Experience of descrimination - Essay Example

Personal Essay A major change occurred in my life 11 years ago when I moved to the United s. My childhood had been spent in Saudi Arabia, but since I have been living in America since I was eight years old. I am now proud to call myself an American, although I do stand out due to my Muslim faith. Despite moving across the Atlantic Ocean, my religion is part of who I am. I will not change my faith just to please other people. When I was living in Saudi Arabia, I was part of the majority religion.

Because of this, I never felt like other people looking down on me or treated me any different. When I moved to the United States, I stood out from the majority of the population firstly because of my ethnicity, but also because of my religion. Overall, I felt that the majority of the American people were welcoming to me. However, I occasionally got some glares from Americans who felt threatening by my presence in their country. I could not single out any ethnicity in particular because there was a wide range of people with different colors of skin that were hostile towards me.

One of the standout memories of being discriminated against occurred not long after I arrived on American soil. In fact, it is one of the earliest memories of my life in America. One day, when I was still young, I became very sick. My parents were so worried about my health that they decided to take me to the local hospital. By this stage, we had already arrived to America. As such, my parents’ language ability was still a little suspect. They tried to use hand signals and gestures to get their point across.

We arrived to the hospital at the peak time of traffic—somewhere around 4 to 5 p.m. I recall that it took a very long time to get to the hospital because of the amount of traffic on the highway. All the while, my parents were reassuring me that everything would be okay as soon as we got to the hospital. They believed that the American healthcare system was the best in the world and that the doctors would take great care of me. However, this was all to change once we arrived at our destination.

As soon as we walked through the front door of the hospital I sensed that something was wrong. While I sat down on a chair in the waiting room, my father went to see the receptionist about a doctor attending to me. The response was that there were currently no doctors available, but one would see me as soon as he became available. Hours and hours went by with no response from those in charge at the hospital. The puzzling thing was that there were many people who had come into the waiting room and then left to see a doctor.

It didn’t seem right that I wasn’t being seen to. After some time, my father became very agitated and took out some of his frustrations on the receptionist at the main desk. Her response was that because we were not American, we did not have health insurance. The hospital had a policy of refusing to see anyone who could not provide adequate health insurance. The seemed grossly unfair because my family had just arrived in the country and were taking our time to adjust to our new environment.

My father had enough money to pay for the appointment, but this was not enough to convince the hospital to let a doctor see me. This experience opened up my eyes to the world around me. Just because I was not an American citizen, I was discriminated against by the hospital. I know that not every American is discriminatory towards Arabs, but the general feeling is that there is hostility towards us. I did not deserve this because the situation was completely out my control. If I had a choice, I would not have gone to a hospital because I did not want to be ill.

But, I should not have received the treatment that I experienced that day at the hospital. What that episode in my life taught me was that people can be incredibly mean when they want to be. There is no reasoning behind their mean attitude except stereotyping. Despite the way I was treated, I would not act the same towards an individual who was of a different race to me.