Pre reading questions for week five

I think racism still continues even though nobody or a few people identify themselves as racist because I believe and this is just me, that there are racism everywhere we go. It may or not be intentional, but racism is still taught in school such as the history of it in school books. Also, it may or not be intentional again, but I think there is racism in like movies and tv shows. For example, I haven’t really heard a lot about it and I don’t know if I’m right either, but I heard when the movie “princess and the frog” came out, there were issues about the princess being black and not white. I think when the commentators said that the election of Obama meant that racism doesn’t matter anymore in the United States was that he became the first ever black man to run for president and that him running for president actually showed the world something. They also believe that him running would possibly stop people from criticizing the United States as a racist country. Dr. Apollon argues that the election of Obama doesn’t mean that “racism is dead” because he states that, “Any racism is more than overcoming the hateful words. It’s about stopping the teaching of racism, the treatment of immigrants, and etc.” If I was talking to one of my friends about white privilege and they said that they don’t see color, they see people individually, I would ask them to clarify what they mean and maybe elaborate it more so maybe I could kind of get their point instead of maybe having a debate over it because to me, that statement has like two meanings behind it. Like I believe the first meaning could be where she is talking about how she doesn’t see racism in people at all but rather how a person treats her with like respect and how hard they work. On the other hand and this is just me again and I don’t know if this makes sense either, but I believe she could also be talking about how she’s blinded by a person’s color. Like even though she might see a person individually, she might treat them a little bit differently based on maybe their gender, their wealth, or status in society. So basically in other words, her statement could be racist. I would define diversity as having many choices or possibilities and I believe that it relates to structural privilege and social justice because I believe that by having structural privilege, you have a choice of working hard to get where you want and same goes for social justice. There are many varieties of getting social justice; it mainly depends on an individual and how much they want it.

 

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