Racism

Throughout this week, my favorite piece we read was definitely “Just Walk On By” by Brent Staples. It describes Staples’s experiences with racism and how it has affected him in all sorts of different scenarios. He tells terrible stories of being mistaken as the “bad guy” solely based on the color of his skin and what he looks like. At the end of the story, he explains different tactics he has come up with to make the people around him feel safer and more comfortable. Although considerate, this to me, is just outrageous. Why has it become HIS job to change the way he acts in order for the strangers around him to not jump to conclusions? Staples says he often keeps his distance from others and even hums happy tunes for the comfort of others.
This reminds me of the school system regarding dress code. In middle school, at Boulan Park, the dress code was so strict to the point where girls couldn’t even wear leggings to school because boys would be “distracted”. To most girls, leggings are just a comfortable pair of pants and it isn’t the girl’s fault if boys get distracted by them. Similar to how society didn’t get rid of racism, administration decided that girls should just all around, stop wearing leggings.
Along with this thought, I simply don’t understand why racism still exists in today’s society. Although possibly naive, I don’t believe that anyone thinks “racism is good”; so why is it still a problem in our world today after so many efforts have been made to stop it?

Comments

  1. Dhatri MedarametlaFebruary 10, 2019 at 10:31 PM

    Hi Sophia! I loved your connection to the dress code at Boulan, as I know that was a huge concern for me at the time. It's definitely true that we shouldn't have had to stop wearing what we wanted to in order to keep the guys from being "distracted". In regards to racism, I agree that it should not be a problem that we still have. However, people are attached to stereotypes, and this makes it even more difficult to remove from society. Overall, great post!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knowledge of the Past

In the quote we were given by Jim Powell in his book Postmodernism for Beginners, it says "... any art attempting to represent the Holocaust should continue to haunt us with its inability to represent the unrepresentable." This means that since the Holocaust was so extreme and inhumane, no form of writing or art will be able to accurately represent it in its entirety. Simplifying a huge event to just words on a paper causes it to lose meaning. Although I agree with this, I still think it's necessary to write about history because it's the only form of documentation we have. This got me thinking- what would happen if we couldn't rely on written history to look back on past events? If we somehow lost all memory and knowledge on history, would we repeat it because we are unaware of the consequences? Humans have truly come a long way in a relatively short period of time. Take the Holocaust, for example, this genocide in WWII happened only 80 years ago. For some reaso...
Read more

What We Leave Behind

Image
When we were assigned to research facts about modernism this week, it was very apparent that once I started looking online, there were a few specific things modernism was known for. For instance, every website I looked at included that modernism was characterized by industrialization, rapid social change, as well as advances in science and art. Thinking back to my past history classes, it seemed like every time period I had ever learned about could be simplified and summarized with just a few keywords- so in that case, what would be used to describe the time period we are living in at the moment? Up until this point in my life, the biggest events I can think of are presidential elections, school shootings, and natural disasters. In terms of technological advancements, what comes to mind for me are Tesla cars, virtual reality devices, and the development of robots. In another couple thousands of years, are these the things the beginning of the 2000's will be known for? Or will ...
Read more

Mind Over Body

"That is real freedom." In this quote from This is Water ,   I believe that Wallace is referencing one's mental freedom. Throughout his speech, one main message is fighting your brain's "natural, hard-wired, default setting". When you aren't making a conscious effort to think about your thoughts, you'll go into an automatic state of mind where it's nearly impossible to control your thoughts. Other than mental freedom , this idea reminds me of your mental strength.   One of the most important lessons I've learned throughout my sixteen years is that the most limiting factor in life is truly your mind. I first realized this when playing sports. I've done gymnastics and dance and color guard and synchronized swimming and throughout all of these, I found out that no, it wasn't my physical abilities that were holding me back from performing at my greatest potential, it was always my mental ability. My coaches always told me that every ...
Read more