School Racism

Prejudice is the way a person or group or people judge something or someone before direct experience. There are many types of prejudices, many of which can be emotionally harmful to anyone. I myself have seen one type of prejudice in action: racism. I have seen it happen in my own school, every day. Throughout high school, racism occurs everywhere all the time. Even I have been involved in racism. For example, I have noticed that people in Glenbrook South, when they are choosing their friends, they tend to choose people that are of the same race as them. Some of them mix a little here and their between other races, however most of them hang out with their own. I have no issues whatsoever on the topic of racism, but I have committed it without knowing it.

I talk to people that aren’t the same race as me all the time, and I am as friendly and kind as I can be when I do, but my closest friends are all the same nationality as me. The kids I like to hang out with the most are Indian, which is what my race is. My situation is the same as others around me. Asians usually hang out with Asians, African-Americans usually hang out with African-Americans, Caucasians usually hang out with Caucasians, Mexicans usually hang out with Mexicans, and within each of our “groups” we go through the same school at the same time every day. Occasionally we mix with each others groups, but in the end the friends we count on the most will be in our own. No question.

Racism can spark many different types of behavior to one another. For example, dislike towards one another before actually meeting them and getting to know them, violence and fighting can occur because of a small misunderstanding between two or more different races, competition towards a “who’s the best at this?” kind of deal between two different people from two different races, and so on. All these are negative effects of racism, but are inevitable. They will happen given the situation of racism in our school, and there is no stopping them. When I see these fights occur in front of my eyes, I frown in disapproval. People are so overcome with their anger that they do not see that their small little fight can have a chain-reaction for their respective groups to have a bigger, more threatening fight. They do not see that they should stop fighting and apologize to each other rather than having their whole groups fighting each other. When two groups of races fight each other, they don’t feel sorry at all for one another, which only escalates the fight. They will show no mercy towards other races, regardless of how little that person know might know about how the whole big fight that first happened.