Teacher responds with 'message of love' after disturbing racist incident
A Montana teacher is going viral after facing racism in a grocery store and responding with love.
Ibrahin Mena, from Caracas, Venezuela, was grocery shopping where he ives in Missoula on Jan. 4, when a fellow shopper sought him out only to insult him.
He posted a video about the experience on Facebook the same day, and it’s garnered the attention of more than 9.5K Facebook users. Though that’s not what he intended.
“I think people need to know that this thing happened,” he says at the start of the 6.5-minute video. But by “people,” he meant his family and friends, and had no idea it would get so much attention.
I am sorry for my English but I think people need to know this things are happening and spread a message of love and tolerance.
Posted by Ibrahin Mena on Friday, January 4, 2019
He goes on to explain that a man basically stalked him in the grocery store until he was met with an opportunity to insult him. Mena tried to avoid any confrontation, waiting for him to pass, but the man wouldn’t leave. So Mena continued shopping, picking up a package of kitchen sponges that he was there to purchase.
“The guy told me, ‘Those are perfect for you. You need to buy those to use for your skin. To use them, to take a shower and use it on your skin as much as you can until you can take your skin off,’” Mena says in the video, after holding up the sponges. “That made me feel so mad, so bad, so sad, I wanted to cry… I didn’t have any answer to him… I took the sponge and I left.”
But as he continued shopping, he couldn’t stop thinking about how he could flip the script. When he was paying, he let two women who had very few items skip him. “We need more people like you,” he recalls one of them saying.
Spirits lifted, he knew what he needed to do. So he recorded this video and posted it on Facebook.
“I think there is a message that needs to arrive in the heart of everybody in the world and it’s the message of love and it’s the message of helping one another instead of being a jerk with someone,” Mena says.
The teacher doesn’t want to name the store at which this occurred. “People have contacted me and made comments saying that the store should make a public apology. I don’t want to create a negative situation for this business,” he tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “The store had nothing to do with the opinion of an individual person, and I think involving the store directly in my experience would challenge the message of love in my video.”
That’s especially true because this is one of very few times he’s experienced racism since he was brought to Missoula to teach at a Spanish immersion school in August 2016.
“I have had a few racist experiences,” he admitted. “One of them happened when I was walking down the street and a random person stopped to yell at me, calling me a ‘black rat.’” But he insists it doesn’t happen often. “Missoulians are so welcoming,” he says. “I feel so grateful to be walking in the street and people smile at me.” In fact, grocery shopping is usually a very pleasant activity for him. “It is almost every time that I go to the supermarket that someone stops me to ask me where I come from and we have very nice conversations. They usually welcome me and make me feel good with their nice comments.”
The response to his video has been just as warm. “I just felt very touched about the amount of people who have wrote to me with powerful words that made me feel welcome and that I am not alone,” he says. “They have reminded me of the value of kind words. I can feel that every word they use is full of love. I have a lot of tears of gratefulness from all the support.” The mostly positive reactions have only confirmed that he did the right thing. “The response I have received constantly reminds me that I should always speak words of encouragement and support. We all need people with kind words. Every person that has written to me has made me very happy and I want to make others feel exactly the same.”
According to local news outlet Missoulian, his students have been equally supportive; one student brought him a poster with supportive notes from her and her family members. Other students have approached Mena to hug him and thank him for what he did.
“It has been super-touching for me,” Mena told Missoulian. “Having adults telling you, but kids come to me and tell me that, it made me think that I am being a good example for them.”
That is of extreme importance to him. “I also made this video because I teach my students every single day that we need to take action to face problems and I would not have been a good example keeping silent about this,” he told Yahoo Lifestyle. “I want to be able to help my students when they are facing a problem like this or any other, but they need to be brave enough to speak up.” He also works hard to teach his students to be open-minded and tolerant. “Monday, for example, we held a videoconference with a Spanish teacher who lives in Turkey and we made a cultural exchange.”
He says he’s not angry at the man who started this whole thing. “I am convinced that many people do these things because they grew up with a lot of prejudice and not because they are bad at heart,” he said. “I would like to share with him and be able to show him that beyond race and color, we are human. We all have a heart and if we learn to communicate with heart, then we will understand each other. There is no ethnic, racial or linguistic barrier when speaking the language of love.”
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.
