Write your personal experience about racism
EN130.2.2 English Composition II
Assignment 3_03
My personal experience of racism
Racism is defined as, "prejudice or animosity against people who belong to other races." It means racism in a way that doesn't sound insulting but more admired. As if, it doesn't really exist nor affect anyone. If anybody was to just say it out loud what racism literally means, it means racism is when someone hates you for the color of your skin. I should also say that it doesn't typically mean that someone of a different color can hate you, racism does occur within one's own race as well. But racism can occur in many aspects and one way that it has the most impact in my own experiences through the media.
Media has the power to create and rearrange things to the public liking since it is the freedom of speech that we get as our right. Through the media I experienced, my first racism; it occurred when I was in junior high school on a hot summer day. My sister and I were walking back to our house from Povoa de Varzim, which as only at the end of our block. As we were walking up the hill to our house, a young boy in his teens rode down the hill on his bicycle. He stared at me and my sister and called out, CHINKY, CHINKS!" I have to admit that at the time I wasn't even sure what "chinky" and "chinks" meant. I asked my older sister, and she responded that it was something that had happen on a radio show. Ignorance was bliss for me, until I started to read the newspaper and our community paper on what happened. Host Manuel mart, made racist comments as he read the paper that reported of 13 year old Hmong girl accused of killing her newborn baby and hiding the corpse. Here's exactly what he said, "That's a lot of egg rolls." Manuel told to listeners that Hmong women traditionally eat boiled chicken as part of a special diet after giving birth. He then said, " I think that when you stuff a baby in the garbage can, you forfeit some of these rituals." More than once during the program, Manuel voiced his intolerance by saying "Assimilate, or hit the P.N. road! This same radio show host has once again reared its ugly head and once again, its aim is on racism, but this time it is on another group.
My identity as a Hmong man in my age of twenty one, in a family of four members, low-income and struggling student has shown me that no matter which way I go, I face discrimination. It doesn't matter much which direction I go, because in the end it goes back to the basic stereotype of my race. It never really looks below the surface of the skin. I never much thought about the differences in the skin color because to me for as long as I can remember we all looked the same, or so I thought. I grew up in an all-white community in the suburbs of Porto, in a small town. It is about 30 to 40 minutes away from the city. The town that I lived in was small, but there was a bigger town next to us, so if we needed anything more, we would just go to the next town. I didn’t realize that there was not many minorities in the north as I had thought. One time my family went to Supermarket to get some much needed things, and my sister and I separated from the rest of the family. Right away a man began to follow us around the store, at first I thought it was just a coincidence, and then I realized that he was watching my sister and me carefully as we walked throughout the store. It was obvious that he worked in the store and he made my sister and me more nervous and scared. I didn’t understand why a person in the store would follow a ten-year-old and a thirteen-year-old in a store. It scared me. But now I realized that he was being racist because we were Asian. I can say that I haven't experience much racism in my twenty-one-years of life, but I would be lying. I experience it every time and every where I go whether it is by me or with my friends especially if we are all minorities.
If it is somewhere sophisticated and upper-class, we get followed. The summer of this year my friends and I decided that we wanted to educate ourselves more fully on art, so we decided to go the Lisbon Institute of Art. The entire time we were there, an employee of the museum watched us and they were not that subtle about it. When we changed rooms, the employees in the next rooms were already looking for us. I realized that the ways I have come to handle racism depends on my mood and the situation and who I am with. I rather have it seem fun than something that would haunt me. Most of the time my friends and I decided to play the part that has been assigned to us by society. The part minority boys and girls who are there, as an employee from the Institute loudly stated that "they might destroy something." I am a stronger person because those around has shown me that racism does exist and would probably still exist even after we are gone. We can't eliminate racism, but we can stop the amount of racism that is done every day, whether it was purposely or accidentally. It isn't easy either and if it was, then there wouldn't be any today. There are still many challenges in ending racism as there was when it first started, and I know that it won't get any easier as time goes on. You can't change a person's feelings about racism or their thoughts on it, and you can't change a person from being racist either, so it doesn't leave you a lot of room to do much. One thing that you can do is talk about racism, because people don't like to talk about it since they feel that it isn't an issue that needs to be discussed. Some would even tell you that they think that racism has already ended, when it is hard to tell when it even started. In finding a way to end cruelty in no way is an easy task, especially one that is as long standing as racism.
Individual efforts in the prevention of racism is having an open mind because without that you don’t really get anywhere far with it. To have the ability as an individual to be nonjudgmental of others is something that not everyone can do because this becomes a personal thing. Understanding another person's background and where they are coming from can help an individual's effort in ending racism because racism is just in short the hate for another based on what you don’t know about that person. From not knowing who the person is, people latch onto the first difference that they can find, whether it is racism, sexism or ageism. To have a world where there is no oppression and no racism would be a great utopia in our minds, but to fully understand what human life is about. It all comes down to the simple fact that we need to just accept each other for the simple differences that are there. The differences are not that big when you look at it up close, but it is easier to look from far away than to get to know each other. As a community what we can do to end racism is by showing a united front of acceptance and support of each other. This shows to those that are racist that we are not confining each other to what our skin looks like. Through the united front and support of each other we can show that it doesn’t matter what we look like to each other or what kind of belief and values we have. Celebrate each other's differences by joining in cultural holidays openly shows that we all accept each other in community despites so many differences in who we are physically and culturally.
References
Calliste, A.M., & Dei, G.J.S. (Eds.). (2000). Power, knowledge and anti-racism education: A critical reader. Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood.
Cole, M. (Ed.). (2000). Education, equality and human rights. London; NewYork: Routledge/Falmer Press.
