Unless you've been living under a rock for basically your entire life, you know what racism is. Most prominently in the U.S., as students, you learn about racism towards black people. I feel that as a country, we focus too much on how badly the black population has been treated in the past, that we don’t realize a modern racism occurring in front of our eyes. So, I pose the question, can there be racism towards white people? Absolutely. This modern racism is not by any means as awful as the “Separate but equal” or Jim Crow eras that the black population went through in the past, but is the action of treating a person different based on the color of their skin. A modern racism exists towards white Americans today, similar to the racism that black Americans faced in the past.
Growing up in a very diverse environment, I learned at a young age that everyone should be accepted for who they are on the inside, not for what they look like. It causes frustration when questions of whether or not white people understand the hardships that black people in our history had to face such as slavery, segregation in schools and other public places, come up in conversations. Everyone who has attended public school in the past decade has done some type of research regarding black history during K-12 schooling. I have not only done extensive research on black history, specifically in slavery and civil rights, but I also hold an award for advocacy of black history. My research has included interviews with several people who faced the hardship first hand. For someone of the black decent, or anyone for that matter, to question the knowledge that I have, cuts very deep.
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