What is actually being done about the problem of racism?
Every so often someone (a politician, a celeb, a sportscaster) makes an in-elegant statement, a blatant slur or an off color joke about someone’s race and the entire world is in an uproar. Everyone has an opinion about what was said, what was meant, and how prolific racism is, and someone will state the obvious that “something must be done”, and “that a dialogue is necessary” etc. But in short order nothing is done and everyone goes about his/her business until the Next racist comment. Are we so paranoid about racism that the concept of discussing it terrifies us? What, if anything, is being done about this obvious problem?
And I don’t consider links to songs from Ave Q helpful :-P
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
8 Answers
Fixing racism is a slow generational problem. That is, you learn racism from your parents, who learned it from their parents, etc.
I think 2 or 3 more generations it will be far less of a problem than it is now, but the problems of kids not growing up in multi-racial environments are still there, so even if you don’t grow up racist, you still “dislike” people of other races you’re not familar with.
I think a lot is already being done. Only decades ago it was okay for blacks to sit in a different part of a cafe or restaurant because of their color and now America has a black President.
Much has been achieved already, unfortunately it isn’t possible to weed out the minority who do still make racist remarks and comments. Those people will always exist and nothing you can do will change their racist ways once they are set in stone.
I think time and education will help the most. Look at all the actual, malicious racist people…not reid, they’re uneducated people in trailer parks and ghettos that don’t try to better themselves, they intentionally wallow in their own ignorance and stay around other ignorant people, then they make the biggest mistake of having kids and teaching them the same thing. This guy once told me growing up that no white person will ever care about me, who the hell tells that to a kid lol. It will take education and an open mind and the willingness to accept and judge people on character.
A lot of us are trying to spread this knowledge, but dumb people keep enforcing bad stereotypes, making other dumb people say “wow, so (insert race) really are like this”.
@Blackberry Disagree, higher-educated people also discriminate. They might not consider themselves racist, but they do treat people of certain races differently (in a negative way). This may very well be because a large portion of that specific ethnic group actually has a higher percentage of people committing certain crimes, but that still means that perfectly willing and normal-behaving people from that group will be expected to not be that. It’s a continuous struggle to reduce the high crime rates in those groups, but you can’t deny that at least people are trying to change that.
Nothing can be done as long as people are willing to assume the worst intentions of everyone else. It would take a whole lot of people stopping assuming that everything that they see is motivated by racism and no other reason in order to make any progress. When that happens, we’ll move forward. Until then, we remain stuck.
It’s not going to go away, because xenophobia makes groups feel strong. If we can find a
way to distinguish between “us” and “them”, we will. I’m not advocating this but I can see
(from reading history) that it’s how we’re built. Each by each, we slowly break down and decide that some “thems” are “usses”. Then they and we become snotty towards other “thems”, ad infinitum. Boring.
Answer this question 
Composing members:
0
