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But I guess children don’t know any better.
One of my favourite films is ‘Bend it like Beckham’. In the story, the protagonist, Jess Palmer, is Indian, and is ostracised by her family because she fancies her football coach who is a white guy. There is even a scene where she says ‘white; no, black; definitely not; Muslim; *cut throat gesture*’. A similar thing occurs in The Big Bang Theory; Priya, Raj’s sister, is too ashamed to tell her parents that she is dating Leonard, a white guy, because her parents will be angry.
Is that not racism? Not wanting your kids to be with a non-Indian person based on the fact that they’re…not Indian? They would prefer you to be with a psychopath, a serial killer, a drug addict, a child molester…as long as they were Indian that’s fine.
Recently a horrific incident occurred where four black youths beat up an autistic white boy who was a Trump supporter, and told him to yell ‘fuck white people’ and ‘fuck Trump.’ ‘Fuck white people’ is a phrase familiar with the black lives matter movement.
No black person in America knows what slavery feels like. All of the slaves and slave owners of that time period are long gone. No black person can claim that they understand how the slaves felt, because they don’t. I will never know what it feels like to walk into a shop and be barred because I’m black. I will never know what it feels like to have to sit at a certain part of the bus because I’m black. I will never know what it feels like to be taken from my family and home country, shoved onto a ship in chains with little food, and taken away to be raped and worked to death for a bunch of rich foreigners because I’m black.
And the Transatlantic Slave Trade is not the only example of human slavery. Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years; the Ancient Egyptians used Hebrew slaves to build their pyramids and their empire. In Russia thousands of peasants worked and starved to death for little money under Tsarist rule. Feudalism in Europe saw the majority of the country living in poverty. Humans have exploited other humans since the beginning of time. It’s basic economics; I don’t want to do this work so I will pay somebody else to do it for me because I’m rich. It still happens today, only nowadays thankfully housekeepers and servants are given human rights and a decent salary and sick days and not made to work ten hours a day for little money like in the Victorian era. A slave is different from a servant, but Africans were not the only people to be enslaved for hundreds of years.
Racism is not ‘white people hating black people’. There is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’ Racism is anyone disliking or discriminating against a person or group of people based on their ethnic background alone. Racism is being furious with your Italian daughter bringing home a black man. Racism is not wanting to befriend someone because they’re Turkish, even if they’re the nicest person ever. Racism is in American History X; when the Neo-Nazis yelled ‘fuck those niggers!’ and the black people yelled ‘punk-ass white boy!’ Racism is in This is England, when the National Front spray painted neighbourhoods and vandalized shops because they belonged to those ‘fucking pakis.’
The only way to end racism is to become colour blind. To see the colour of a person’s skin as insignificant, just a part of their physical description and no more. To see the person for who they are inside, and not to generalise a group of people. To stop with this ‘lightskinned vs darkskinned’ bullshit and talk about what a ‘proud black person’ you are. To treat everybody with kindness and politeness before you find out they’re a total arsehole, not to assume they’re an arsehole just because they’re from Mexico.
