Sunday, November 8, 2015

Racism

Racism is a man-made conception. It's an idea that we humans made up inside our minds to try to cover up our fears of different people by belittling them by calling them vulgar names or maybe even enslaving them to do their work. In the first article that was basically twenty paragraphs of intellectual insight, the author gives his view on racism and explain racism was an idea that man created when we started enslaving different races. Once the idea of slavery became a world-wide phenomenon, the idea of racism floated around into different parts of the world. Somewhere in his article he goes on to say how the concept of religion influenced the concept of racism. Religion is to believe in a set of deities and beliefs, which could be anything you want to believe. With the rise of Christianity, crusaders would go on to persecute the followers of Islam and try to conqueror the Jewish city of Jerusalem. Persecution is racism; it's the ill-treatment of a person, and in the case of racism it's the minorities. I could agree on the fact that religion helped shape the idea of racism because if you believed or practiced something different from the majority, you were persecuted. It's funny how religion is supposed to preach holiness and peace yet many wars and outbreaks of violence occurred due to religion.





In the second article, the author's main purpose is to tell us how racist America is. Our culture is made up of many racists. It just isn't prejudice against the blacks, but even Asians have been discriminated. Citizens of America are known to have passed laws that either ban or encourage discrimination against different races. In fact, we had to add Amendments to our Constitution just so we could attempt to keep everybody equal. Even though we have these Amendments, we are still a racist society. We are always putting unfair stereotypes on different races. I believe one of the reasons of this is how the media portrays them. Things like movies or the news can manipulate how we view people. It can also give people a fear that shouldn't even exist. For example, Blacks are unfairly stereotyped as thugs due to what television and movies show us. We looks at cases like the shooting of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown and see young African American boys getting shot because the perpetrator had stereotypes in their mind about the media version of Blacks. You also see Islamic people being discriminated because a couple radicals who practice Islam decided to do unfortunate things on 9/11. We all now stereotype Muslims as terrorists due to this day. Just because a minority of a race do bad things doesn't mean the whole race should be oppressed. That's just how it is with every race.





The third and final article is basically what I hit on in the last paragraph. Media is always putting unfair stereotypes on different races. Media portraying different races wrongfully dates back from a long time ago. In fact, many movies and cartoons (yes, the things that young children watch) from the 30's, 40's and 50's displays many elements of racism. For example, a very popular cartoon that we've all seen and love is Tom and Jerry. Tom and Jerry was known to show many pieces of racism. The cartoon shows a black maid with a strong black dialect and showing low intelligence. Tom and Jerry also showed many scenes with "Blackface." Blackface was a popular thing back in the day that occurred in film and television. Blackface is when a performer puts on make-up to make them look black and then they act like the stereotypical black person. Around the 0:57 mark of this clip from Tom and Jerry, you can see an example of it. This is another good clip showing what Blackface was. Things have really changed as now we have evolved into a more politically correct state when it comes to what the media shows. Still, many of the things we see on television lead us to still believe in the stereotypes in races. We are shown African-Americans getting in trouble or illegal Latinos sneaking into America. The media brainwashes us into believing in these received ideas of races that we all fear and hate each other. Racism is the worst man-made conception to ever be made up and can easily destroy mankind.




We are racist because we are scared. We are scared of how different people can be. There is nothing wrong with being different but the fear of the unknown is what gets us hating on others. Racism is an idea. Just because your skin is a different color or your God is different from their God doesn't mean you should differentiate people. We are all humans! We all have feelings and ambitions! We all bleed red and are born only to die later and be covered in dirt! Even though we are all trying to end racism, how come we are still deeply promoting it? For example, when you have to circle in what ethnicity you are on a test or a form for employment. Does it really matter if your Asian or Latino trying to take the ACT or applying for a job or trying to get a driver's license? It shouldn't because the document that gave us freedom (Declaration of Independence) states in the second paragraph and I quote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The only way we will stop racism is to stop viewing people as "black" or "white" or "Asian" or "Hispanic". Why can't we just look at the big picture and realize that we are all human. There are good and bad people in every race. We got to pull our heads out of our behinds and realize that sometimes we got to see the good in everybody. Not everyone will be a goody two-shoes and it's going to come with every race. Let's put our differences aside and finally realize that we are all humans and not judge people unfairly because that's what racism really is.




I would like to share this video of Morgan Freeman's solution to stop racism. Very intelligent man that I agree with completely. #Freeman2020

2 comments:

  1. Actually made me think of a interesting thought. I wonder if the majority of producers/writers/ etc. are white people? I wonder what the ratio is of black to white to other races.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was looking for the 3 highlighted quotes also.

    ReplyDelete