03.01.06
Xenophobia
Last night my teammate, Josh, suprised me with a story about one of the owners of a resaraunt he goes to pretty often. She asked him where he lived and he told her, at which point she said that she never goes down to that area because it’s too dangerous.
I was suprised to hear this, since I live about two blocks away from Josh, and haven’t ever felt like this was an unsafe place to live. Aside from one incident (which was, at the time, a little scary), the area we live in has been great. I suppose there is a possiblity that I am just naive about things, but we’ve been here nearly a year. However, there is something different about my neighboorhood. For whatever reason, there are lots of immigrants. Mostly from Peru, Romania, and the Ukraine. And I have a feeling that this woman assumed that this neighboorhood was dangerous because there are lots of foreigners. Even the Italian word for foreigners, stranieri, sounds “suspicious.” Italians are a close knit group, who, it seems to me, have an inherent mistrust of outsiders.