A Discussion on Racial Discrimination
The conversation my English class had one day about racial descrimiation.
There are many groups of people that would claim that this is an issue that does not exist. Those are the people who do not desciminate racially at all. The truly virtuous of us who do not care about the color of one’s skin. This is how the discussion came about in my English class one day this April.
I had overheard one of my friends exclaiming, outraged, that he was not racist, but that he does seperate people in his mind by color. Later that day I confronted him on this, just to figure out what really did happen to cause people to ask him about whether he was rascist. He said that it came about when he mistook another friend of mine (Who is African-American) with an African-American friend of his. The latter was extremely angered and accused him of just dumping all African-American people into one category and not caring really on who that person was.
I totally understood my friend’s position. He was busy working at Study Hall, and just glanced to see who it was. He made an assumption on what he took in in that rapid glance and acted upon what he percieved to be in front of him.
Where do you stand? Is grouping people by color and other features of the face, etc, racial discrimination, or jsut a way of figuring out who is in front of you. I think this way, if I know one person who is caucasian, and I know another person who looks exactly like the other person, except he is African/African-American, how else would I know who it was beyond the color of their skin?
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Post CommentLeonardo da Vinci E.
On February 27, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Instead of confronting people over small petty matters they might try one of the new activist methods I’m experimenting with: I go into a restaurant and if I notice the workers are a rainbow of what America is ,then I send a tip to the manager telling her I enjoyed the fact that she does not discriminate. In the future I plan to go into restaurants with a typed card prepared, giving a two dollar tip if the workers were nice,but outlining that the full tip could not be given because unlike many others places of employment the workers were not well integrated .