Persuasive Essay On Race Relations

Race relations are always a scary or uncomfortable topic for people to discuss amongst groups of different ethnicities and racial identities. It is a long standing tradition in the United States to walk a fine line and use politically correct terms in the above mentioned setting but to feel perfectly comfortable to speak freely when in a setting surrounded by likeminded people who share similar political affiliations and race. This is the main reason discussions surrounding the idea of race are too often avoided in today’s school systems and in society in general. If we are to encourage our students and children to be free thinking future citizens of our global society, we must first become one ourselves. The only way to accomplish this

Although it would be an injustice to say that one could sum up the entire history of race interrelations in the United States in one essay, a brief overview is always beneficial.
Because we are only human, our history is a crazy bumbling mess “filled with ironies and unintended consequences, paths not taken and opportunities missed” (Cottrol, 2013). Historically white people have oppressed people of color from the moment we first ran into them during European exploration. It was not until a few hundred years later that African Americans were able to have a common enemy in The Jim Crow Legislation of the American South. This is the first time we see large masses of people of color coming together to fight for their rights (Cottrol, 2013). A direct effect of this fight was Affirmative Action, legislation that allowed some equality in education and the work place. This scared white people because it made the job market more competitive. This in turn caused white Americans to claim that “their” jobs were being “stolen” simply because they were white (Fine, Weis, Powell Pruitt, Burns, 2012). There is a long history of anger and mistrust between white Americans and Americans of color, some justified and some