Racism And How To Cope With It Essay Example

Discrimination is an issue that’s existed for more than 100 years in our country, and it needs to stop. To be clear, I’m not saying there’s one right way to solve this. It takes a team effort from everyone in the world to join together and realize that change needs to happen.  

Racism is an ideology people have that grants, usually, their own ethnic group with “more authority/power” over all the others. It’s sort of intertwined with the definition of discrimination- the bettering, or favor of, an individual based solely what group they belong to, rather than the person themselves. In result, abuse towards the “outsiders” will concur, whether verbal or physical. Ever since Europe colonized America, and even before that, there’ve been countless documentations of unfair treatment towards, specifically, the African and/or African American community. They were treated as slaves, whilst the racist people of European descent thought of themselves as superior and having more authority over “their” slaves simply for having that color of skin tone.                                                                 

This usually happens in a society where the people there participate in similar actions described above, thus younger minds will absorb it and copy it to the T. To avoid such occurrences from happening, we have to better educate everyone on how/why this’ wrong. For example, and this is taking practice now as we speak, we can be educating kids on the unfairness of slavery in America and what happened to the victims of it, how it was seen to both parties, and why it happened. This shows a neutral perspective over the whole event and allows the kid to make their own judgement on this. Was it wrong? How so? Etc.

Another popular way for people to “get educated” is by reading or listening to first-hand experiences about major cultural/societal importance. Based on what I’ve seen in my personal experiences, the more informed you are about a group’s culture and way of life, the less likely you’ll make a mistake and accidentally offend someone. For instance, when I was in elementary school, I didn’t really understand how the concept of racism worked exactly. I didn’t even know what it was. Moving on, I was sitting with my friends waiting to be picked up by my mom. We were making jokes and laughing, all the like. I was caught up in the moment and didn’t really register the “joke” I’ve made could’ve come out as offensive to my African American friends. When someone called me out on it though, I was confused. Racist? How? What does that mean?

Racism is wrong in the sense of forming very prejudiced thoughts towards a whole group of people without having any reasonable claim or reason for doing so. On paper, the very thing seems so silly, so then why’re people still doing it? Usually, it stems from the elated feeling of power they feel they have when they feel like they have control over a large quantity. There are multiple ways to combat this, but it’s best to take a more unbiased approach. If we give a favored reason or explanation, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of racism? The whole reason why people are combatting against it is because it’s a biased opinion towards ethnicities. If you did so, even with a pure intention, that would only make you a hypocrite and your words, as valid they might’ve been, would become meaningless then.

There are multiple ways to solve or combat this unfair treatment towards ethnicities, but the process described above is something I believe we should start with first. After all, all things start at the base roots, and children are the future.