I'm white and Arab and my grandmother is white. Recently she said that "Arabs are violent and bloodthirsty by nature" and that hurt me a lot. A few days ago she said she would give me her blood if I needed it. How do I reconcile this? This has caused me quite a lot of anguish and I don't know how to make sense of it.
Either your grandmother is erasing your identity as an Arab person or she is saying that she believes that you are “violent and bloodthirsty by nature” but chose to love you “”“in spite of it”“”, either way its very damaging. Her racist conceptions of Arab people and her love of you cannot be reconciled. She is choosing which parts of you to love and which parts of you not to love (or which parts of you she wants to acknowledge exist), she is compartmentalizing your existence, and that’s not how you love us. You can’t love but turn around and make us a “them” for which you harbour hate.