The outside world
“You have any college in mind that you will apply to, Ngan?” It was another normal day of my senior year in high school: ten of us who were applying for U.S colleges formed a special group after class, cramming SAT and writing essays together.
“Yeah! I have my list of White schools here already. I want a school with very few or no Vietnamese students, you know. Do you want to check it out?” I hesitated as she waved the paper casually in front of me. “Just take it out a little bit,” whispered a faint voice in my head.
I stopped for a moment and wondered if I was prejudiced to look at the paper. No, it was as if I was already racially prejudiced to have considered looking at the paper.
Looking back, the application process
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One will not be stopped on the street by the police just because he or she is a minority. One will not have his or her lunch money stolen by the bullies at school just because he or she is an LGBT. People know better to just ignore those they are not in favor of. Thus, the black maids raising the white kids yet forced to used separated restrooms in “The Help” or the little boy beaten up in the street by the Cobras in “The Karate Kid” - I was not able to make sense of what I saw on TV using the social knowledge I was provided with. It was a whole different world - the world of the media, and the world of people living across the globe. We don’t even have a term for “hate crime” in Vietnam. We don’t have racism in Vietnam. We only have racism in the world, a 7pm-daily-world-news-on-TV thing. “Lucky me, brought up in such a place without all the bullying and discrimination,” I thought after watching The Karate Kid in middle …show more content…
And we all openly accept such standards of beauty. Light skin girls are more likely to win The Beauty Pageant. Dark skin girls are less likely to appear in cosmetic commercials. Actually they do in the first half of the commercials, the “before using our products” part. Those with light skin are those working in the office with ACs and driving cars, those having enough money to buy skin products. Those with dark skin are those working under the glazing sun and driving motorbikes. Light skin tone also symbolizes wealth. Let us all accept that way of reasoning and we Vietnamese can all happily and ignorantly agree that Vietnam is a colorism-free
The college application process is one of the hardest parts of a high school career.
“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group,” Peggy McIntosh wrote in her article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Too often this country lets ignorance be a substitute for racism. Many believe that if it is not blatant racism, then what they are doing is okay. Both the video and the article show that by reversing the terms, there is proof that racism is still very existent in this world. By looking into A Class Divided and White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack along with their ability to broaden the cultural competence, once can see how race is still very prominent in our culture.
The film that interested me for this assignment was “Boyz n the Hood”. The movie was about a Los Angeles neighborhood expanding of drug and gang culture, with increasingly tragic results. It was about how one teen had family support to guide him on the right path in life regarding the social problems around him. The other two teens in the film wasn’t as fortunate and fell into the social problems of drugs, violence, and gangs; where one ended up dead.
In “The Help, A Feel-Good Movie That Feels Kind of Icky”, Dana Stevens discloses her thoughts on a movie that focuses on the civil rights movement. Stevens has a lot to say about the movie, good and bad, however the focal point of it is that in the media industry we like to sugarcoat the truth about times in history. This movie is about black-white relations in America and happens to end up being mostly about a white character and her journey to enlightenment. Stevens points out that in media it seems that we address issues but always have a dominant white character. The movie offers insight into what life was like during the civil rights movement but “the catharsis it offers feels glib and insufficient,” reinforcing Stevens statement about the media and it diminishing the ugly truth about race relations in America (Stevens 776). She also goes on to say that media does this to allow the viewer to not feel so guilty about racism in the past and to try while at the same time putting the viewer’s mind to rest about present day racism. Stevens believes that the movie is somewhat of a blurred line between what actually happened in the past and it being a feel good movie. For it to be historically accurate, Stevens would say it
Poor Kids is a documentary that highlights a major issue the United States is suffering from. This issue is known as poverty, more specifically, childhood poverty. This documentary views the world through the eyes of children that are subjected to lives of poverty due to the poor financial state that their parents are in. Life is very rough for these children and they must live their everyday lives with little to none of the luxuries most people take for granted. Poor Kids sheds light on the painful fact that there are children that starve every day in the United States.
The 1960’s and early 1970’s were a time that eternally changed the culture and humanity of America. It was a time widely known for peace and love when in reality; many minorities were struggling to gain a modicum of equality and freedom. It was a time, in which a younger generation rebelled against the conventional norms, questioning power and government, and insisting on more freedoms for minorities. In addition, an enormous movement began rising in opposition to the Vietnam War. It was a time of brutal altercations, with the civil rights movement and the youth culture demanding equality and the war in Vietnam put public loyalty to the test. Countless African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, women, and college students became frustrated, angry, and disillusioned by the turmoil around them.
Racism and discrimination continue to be a prevalent problem in American society. Although minorities have made significant strides toward autonomy and equality, the images in media, specifically television, continue to misrepresent and manipulate the public opinion of blacks. It is no longer a blatant practice upheld by the law and celebrated with hangings and beatings, but instead it is a subtle practice that is perceived in the entertainment and media industries. Whether it’s appearing in disparaging roles or being negatively portrayed in newscasts, blacks continue to be the victims of an industry that relies on old ideas to appeal to the majority. The viscous cycle that is the unconscious racism of the media continues to not only be detrimental to the white consumers, who base what they know about blacks on what is represented on television, but also the black consumers, who grow up with a false sense of identity.
One believes that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s made America safer for all races, but in fact, racism and discrimination are still big factors that continue to plague films, music, and even video games. I the article Race the Power of an Illusion, Dalton Conley says, “the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s really marks both an opportunity and a new danger in terms of racial relations in America. On the one hand, the Civil Rights era officially ended inequality of opportunity. It officially ended de jure legal inequality, so it was no longer legal for employers, for landlords, or for any public institution or accommodations to discriminate based on race. At the same time, those civil rights triumphs did nothing to address the underlying economic and so...
Now days people are struggling with people accepting their opinion. Some people like other people of the same sex and because of that they're not treated the same. There was a new law made. They are having difficulties showing their opinion to the world.Some people say being gay is wrong, and others say it’s okay to be different. There are still a lot of people who are racist and people everyday still get teased by and laughed at because of their color of skin ,and has led to serious problems and boycotts. Some people think it’s okay to have a boundary in between color skin people. If you are going to judge someone judge them by their character at least not by their color of their skin because at the end of the day we all breathe the same air. On December 5th Dr King was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to defend Rosa Parks a lady that refused to stand up her seat for a white person. The next day that happened every single negro started boycotting by not going on the busses, that way they would run out of business. Majority of the citizens who went on the busses were African
Firstly, “the most lethal and toxic form of racism in America is committed daily by white people who consider themselves to be decent, honest, loving, and caring folks.” This statement is true and false. It is false to say for just the white people to wake up from this blindness. It is all ethnicities (sure, mostly white people) that need to wake up and see that this country - this world - has a problem with always turning a blind eye to social injustice. Plurality can never be possible if this continues to happen. Secondly, “prejudice and discrimination between people of color is NOT the same - it is fundamentally different from - prejudice and discrimination between white people and people of color.” This idea - to say that being prejudice and discriminating between people of color and between white people and people of color - is the same. Being prejudice and acting on that thought by discriminating is the same whether you’re considered “white”, “black”, “brown”, “yellow”, or “green” just because two people of opposing skin colors discriminate between each other doesn’t mean it’s worse or better than two people of the same skin colors. They are both morally and socially unjust. Just because the opposing skin colors have a long and bloody history doesn’t make the people with the same skin color any different; they are both going through prejudice and discrimination. That’s like saying the bully is allowed to get punched by the bullied in the face because he was bullied. It’s not ok because if the bullied were to have punched the bully that “bullied” has not become the bully and the bully has become the “bullied” all because the bullied stooped to the bully 's level by punching him/her back. The same concept is applied to the third and final topic; “racism is essentially a white problem.” To say that racism is a white problem is technically being prejudice against the white people,
Presently racism in the U.S. is presented through the media’s portrayal of the shooting of African Americans by police officers. This racism can be found in the racial bias that is obvious in media in the present day. In the video “Terence Crutcher’s Police Shooting & Racial Bias in America” by The Daily Show, Trevor Noah mentions that we are “ living in a society where racial divisions are so deeply baked into every part of society that we don’t even notice them anymore” (The Daily Show). By stating this Noah is showing that the racial bias that is shown in many news interviews and media forms is often overlooked and quite often already present. Another example of the racial bias that is set in most Americans can be found in the video “A White Audience is Left Speechless Racism in America” when a lady asks the audience to stand up if they would want to be treated the way African Americans are treated in society. The lady responds to her audiences lack of standing by stating the obvious fact they they are aware of the situation and they do not want that to happen to them, then she asks why they “are so willing to accept it or allow it to happen to others” (YouTube). This shows the fact that people are aware of the way that African Americans are being treated because of racial bias however because the way they are treated is so normalized people aren’t
Every generation faces new challenges and new problems to which we have progressed, conquered or simply just swept right under the rug. In today’s world we are increasingly facing numerous social problems, such as income disparity, unemployment, political instability amongst many others, but racism seems to have resurfaced in these past years. Although, the United States has come a long way in the issue of racism, it has never completely conquered it. Incidents such the shooting at Ferguson Missouri has raised an upheaval of protesters against the Country’s system that claims equal treatment and equal opportunity for all, regardless of race or gender. Incidents such as the one previously mentioned, clearly depicts that white-power continues
Racism can take on many forms that plague the brain with irrationality that affects an individual’s thoughts and actions. Racism can be a physical form, through an external action, or can branch off into unethical thoughts. This is more known to be a discriminative thought, judging a person based on impressions. This social problem can also be ignored by the oblivious persons of the crowd. Many individuals speak out about how racial tension is long gone and forever forgotten ever since the first African-American was elected to be president in 2008, but this can be evidently proven false. Racial tension is still here to target the minorities in the forms of affirmative action and Ferguson conflicts.
Such a simple but revealing quote captures the essence of a new form of racism that has evolved in America. Appalling cases of overt racism still manifest themselves, but the racism of today has become considerably more subtle than in the past. This subtlety is likely the cause of America’s disillusioned attitude towards racism. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice.” Many have falsely assumed that with the eradication of explicit segregation laws, the problems of race and more importantly racism had been solved. The racism of today might not be as embedded within the law, but the racism of today quietly, yet undeniably, benefits and privileges certain groups over others. I would challenge society to reconsider its definition of racism, and use that new understanding to help make for a better tomorrow. The first step is for society to concede that America has produced a systemized hierarchy, one that has become known as white privilege.
Part of human nature is judging something by what surrounds it even if it is another human. Think of a community that has every color, every race, every religion, and every kind of person that community however, doesn’t value each other to some point which causes a problem, a problem that we call racism in today’s era, a problem that needs to be eliminated because it allows a gap that shouldn’t exist in our society. Our society must understand that it isn’t okay to discriminate someone for how they look or what they believe in or what color they happen to be, specifically speaking to those who aren’t smart enough to realize that discrimination isn’t making any change for the better nor is it allowing certain groups in the community to advocate