RacismAn underlying problem is promoting racism.
It is the fact that a lot of people believe, and try to make they believe, that racism no longer exists. Many people today live their lives oblivious to what is happening in the world around them, often trying to convince themselves that racism is not a problem in their world. Others know all about the problem, but don’t really realize that they themselves could possibly be adding to the problem by discriminating against someone else’s human rights, and at the same time going around saying how open-minded they are. One of the main problems of racism is that many people live in racist conditions, without even seeing it. Often times it’s in their school, workplace, community, or even in their own homes. People often tell jokes with racist slurs, and while we know not to laugh at ones about blacks, it seems that ones about other races like Chinese and Hispanic are okay.
We tell ourselves that they are just jokes, but not to those who they are ridiculing. We are all perpetrators of this and we usually feel that these types of jokes are harmless. They can be harmless and maybe at times we even think they are funny, but they are also hurtful and degrading. Some of the biggest racists are those who don’t even know that they are, and even say that they aren’t.
These people are racist because they cannot comprehend what is happening and do not realize what they are saying is racist. Until they come to grips with this problem, in their minds there is no problem. They say that they are not racist, even when they don’t hire the East Indian employee who was the most qualified of the candidates, even when the athletic team they coach consists of all white athletes. Often times these people feel that just because a person is a certain color or race, that they must be a thief or a criminal. This is very typical in today’s society and no one deserves to be prejudged like that. The prejudice of people in the world is disgusting.
The worst part of it all is that they don’t even know that they are doing it, often thinking that it is just normal behavior. There are people that don’t realize that they are racist and then there are those people who are ignorant and unaware of racism in the world. They walk down the streets, through the stores and working at their job, completely oblivious. We don’t see what is happening around us because we don’t want to see it. If you take someone and put them in the heart of a racist area, would they notice the problems then or would they still deny or overlook the fact of racism? Those people who do not see that racism is a problem are almost as bad as the racists themselves.
This is not to be taken in the wrong way; some people who ignore racism are those people who are trying to push racism out of their own lives and out of the world. However, as long as we have people who are unaware of the problem, it will continue to thrive. In society today people look for an easy way out of problems. Most of the time, they can just blame their problems on other people or other races, just as the Nazis did with the Jews, the Gypsies and others in Nazi Germany. Hitler was scared of different people so he felt he had to exterminate 6 million of them. When people behave in this prejudiced way, they just make themselves seem ignorant.
Racism has been present in our world for more than 3,000 years. Take African-Americans, before the Million Man March, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement; black people were given less respect than dogs. For the first century of our countrys existence, blacks were slaves with no rights. Even after the Civil War freed them, there was no equal opportunity and much oppression of them by whites, particularly in the South. They were constant targets of violence and were put to death by racist hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s civil rights movement was the first step towards a truly de-segregated America. If it had not been for people like Dr. King, Maya Angelou and other strong-willed and just people, the country would probably still have two types of rest rooms– one for whites and one for blacks.
