Racism is something that we tweet about, read news articles about, and see on posters at Trump rallies, but to most people seems to be an intangible and foreign experience. For some reason, we’ve put it into our heads that racism only occurs when a white person gets a few months in jail for doing something a black person got years for, or when white people are shouting racial slurs at the many minorities that make up America. We seem to think that racism only happens in large doses, and that only a few people are responsible for it. That not every black person in America has experienced it, or that legal Hispanics never feel racially targeted. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, really I do, but I’m here to tell you that unfortunately, that’s not the case. Being a minority is hard, but being a minority where minorities “don’t belong”, is a struggle only few know, one of them being myself.
I’m a black, 17 year old girl, who is from Zimbabwe, lives in Texas, loves America, and experiences racism everyday. Now I don’t experience it in big ways, since I don’t get called the N word, and no one is threatening to lynch me for being black. But over time I’ve witness that it’s in the little things.
I go to a small, predominately white, private school, the same school I’ve been attending for all 12 years of my grade school education. I’ve basically had the same friends and teachers all my life. Of course new students and faculty have come along, but I’ve been seeing the same faces everyday for a long time. I’ve always been one of few black people at my school, and my friends don’t let me forget it.
I get microassults thrown at me all day, from “it’s just cause you’re black”, to “I would never date a black girl……oh except for you”. One of my personal favorites is, “you’re extremely pretty for a black girl”, or “you’re prettier than all the other black girls, don’t worry”. If we are studying history and it’s the chapter that references slavery a lot, I always catch the teacher staring all the black kids before they say the words black, slaves, or African-American. Then there’s always the good old, “you don’t act black”, or, “you’re an Oreo, like you’re black on the outside but white on the inside”, or “aren’t you glad you’re not ghetto?”, all of which are very offensive.
To top it all off, I’m African, which means I get the questions about every country in Africa, even though I’m only from one. I got teased a lot when I was little about being African, as most African kids do. My parents do things differently and that showed. This, separated me from the rest of the black kids in the school and it kind of turned them against me too. I get asked if Africans live in huts, or how I learned to speak English. If something happened in Africa, regardless of how far from Zimbabwe it was, always get asked if my family is okay. When other people try and ask me what language I speak, they feel obligated to add a bunch on tongue clicks, which is ironic because my language has no clicks in it. I always get asked if I speak African, which for the record is not a language, and is the equivalent of me asking an American if they speak American. (See how dumb it sounds?)
I am very willing to bet that every black person has experienced a form of this sort of racism. I am also pretty confident that they probably experience this kind of racism on a weekly, or even, dare I say, a daily basis. It happens when a white womam clutches her purse when my black brother walks by. It happens when a white police officer shoots an unarmed black man. And the sad part is that it happens every, single, day.
Now, does this make these people racist? I’d like to think my friends and teachers know not what they do. When I confronted one of my friends about it, he denied it, claiming that I should know better, and I did. But he had just said that the reason I was mad was because I was an angry black woman and that comment turned me into an angry black woman. That afternoon I realized that most people don’t even know they are doing it. Sometimes they are just trying to be funny, and other times it’s an unspoken prejudice that comes to them as second nature. Their actions are the result of an unfortunate misportrayal of other races and ethnicities. These people are uneducated and unaware of the power that their words has on the way someone views themselves and others.
So what do we do? How do we solve this issue? Well first of all, people can’t fix an issue they are aware of. So next time your friends throw that little joke your way let them know what’s wrong with what they just said. Stop the bs. Stop laughing at the jokes. It’s time for us as minorities to stand up for ourselves. You don’t hear nearly as many white school shooter jokes as you do black drug dealer jokes now do you? The first step is education, which will help educate and correct those thought processes.
Now there will always be certain thoughts that accompany people based on the way that they look, but the key to solving this widespread and highly ignored issue is to teach people how to deal with their differences, and maybe even find some humor in it all.
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