My friend Jean posted a facebook linky to a blog article about racism. I hope folks take a minute to read it. It certainly made me think.
Why does it still matter what color someone's skin is? I just don't understand.
Here, it's not so much blacks, but hispanics, especially immigrants, but any hispanic will do (when I was younger, the venom was directed at Asians). The venom against folks just trying to make a better life for their families shocks and astounds me. I simply do not understand. We ALL were immigrants, somewhere back in our family history, whether intentionally or by force, and, dammit, not every immigrant into our land was documented and cataloged at Ellis Island.
Paraphrased from MLK:
I have a dream that (we) will one day live in a nation where (people) will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I hope, I pray, that someday that dream will come true. For everyone.
Thanks, Jean, for posting the linky. {{huggs}}
2 comments:
Hmm, interesting. I was under the impression that racism had a broader definition then that post indicates. "To be racist, you don’t have to hate non-whites. All you need is to see them as “others”; as people who are not “your” people (even if you’re both Americans, Canadians…)”
I wonder if I fit in it? I see my family as "your people" and everyone else as "others".
Hi Mr. J, nice to meet you!
I have a friend, a writer, who is black and she struggles a LOT with many of the things in that little article. As someone who has never been passed over, marginalized, or reviled simply because of the color of my skin, it's hard for me to understand the subtle, invasive bits of racism that creep into life day after day after day, things that my friend experiences all of the time. It grates on her, and it perplexes me, because, to me, skin color is such arbitrary measurement that shouldn't matter, yet it does. I try to treat people as people, regardless of their color (my own personal prejudices tend to run in a completely different direction) but when a different friend linked to that article, I felt like I had to pass it on.
As humans, we do categorize people as 'us' and 'other', that's part of our psychological makeup, honed through millennia as we evolved, but as Modern Americans (or Canadians or Where-ever-ians) perhaps it's time to categorize by other means.
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