Breeds and Stigmas

Last week my dad and I took a father-daughter beach trip for bonding. We packed our boogie-boards, and headed out for an hour long drive to Ventura for the day.

As we talked he began to talk about my grandmother (his mom) who is developing dementia as she ages. She has also become very set in her ways. He began to describe, not quite a vent, mind you, her personality over recent years.

As he began, somehow the comment came up that she is half Scottish and that must be where her stubbornness comes from. Now I am not as argumentative as I was in high school with my dad anymore. I have learned to channel my frustrations regarding my dad’s sometimes inappropriate comments into that of discussion. So we continued to talk about culture. As we continued, somehow he began to try to re-put together my own ethnicity and origins. He began, “Well, you’re half Jewish…”

“No, I’m not, Dad. I am 100 percent Jewish. It’s not a race or a gene. It’s a religion.” Fifty percent of my body can’t believe Jesus is our Savior, and Fifty percent believe he’s just a nice guy, am I right?

“So what do you say then?” he asked, clearly trying to prove his right-ness.

“I’m half Russian, Dad. If you can even say that. We’re talking about origins.”

Of course different things are acceptable and PC for different generations, sometimes with your family it isn’t a good idea to correct them. But this began my thoughts on race culture and attaching a stigma or personality trait as I pondered his umbrella Scottish comment.

A few days later I was at the farmer’s market with a good friend and I began to describe a puppy in the pet shop that I had fallen in love with. I had talked to my dog-loving aunt about it. I told my friend that my aunt and I later looked up my new-found love in a dog encyclopedia. It told us that the breed (an Akita) was not considered a people-dog, but is generally very loyal to its sole owner. I expressed (not that I was in the position to become a new dog owner) that this information was really discouraging and sad.

My friend told me that she owns a pitbull back at home (I own a black lab). I asked, “Aren’t they typically aggressive dogs?” She explained that it depends how you raise any dog and continued by saying they raised theirs with a lot of love, so it’s a very sweet and docile dog.

This made me think a lot about prejudices. If dog breeds are like human races or cultures, than all of these umbrella descriptions of dog types is the same things as our stereotyping or prejudice comments, which brought me hard to the point that it is our conditions that shape us. Maybe my dad had a glimmer of a point calling my grandma stubborn, but maybe that point should be redirected. Maybe its that in Scotland there is dark weather and her family worked as tough peasants farming potatoes so they became hard, and ran their families with hard family values. I don’t know. Point is, that our cultural traditions and family is what gives us our personality traits not our stereotype or race.

Maybe equating dog breeds and humans is offensive, but what I found was a strange connection between how our descriptions and perspectives as well as their practical applications and how those evolve. Like someone mentioned in class, “anything can be myth, because fact is all something we’ve just agreed upon for now.” So next time someone is shocked that he was attacked by a golden retriever, its answers may just lie a lot in the dogs upbringing and owners, not its believed personality in some encyclopedia.