Skip to main content

Our Blind Side

Naturalization—used by whites to explain segregation as "natural". Our society today is engulfed in racism but we tend to be blind to it because it is extremely normalized. Racist actions within our society are described as “just the way things are” or “just part of life”. By doing this, we are continually discriminating and pushing down one race as we make one race dominant over all the others. While our racist tendencies are not as clear-cut as they were in the days of slavery, our actions are still deeply affecting the recipients of the racism. Slurs, slangs, stereotypes—these are only a few examples of commonly used racism in our present day society. In our lives today, we are so accustomed to our routine lifestyles that we fail to see the reality that is going on outside of our own lives. Today, there are still activists and small movements for the recipients of this hurtful racism. We fail to see this reality because we are blind to it, as our society hides it so well. Whether you are or are not on the other side, receiving the racism, we need to become aware. We need to change our so called “traditional ways” and make new changes towards improving our blindness. Naturalization is so prevalent in our society and with no effort towards change, we will remain where we are and make no progress towards a more unified community. The article strongly supports the presence of naturalization in our society when it states, “Forced by federal housing policy and local practices into slums and nearly all-black neighborhoods, African-Americans lived apart from the city's white population, which limited their ability to enroll in better schools in white neighborhoods or seize job opportunities across the city or suburbs” (Wilkinson).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's So Great About Poetry?

Poetry- the unit that most students dread to learn about in their English class. But why is poetry so disliked among high school students? A few of these reasons, and that I can attest for personally, are that poetry is seen as old, it can be quite difficult to understand/interpret, and we just fail to see the point of it. However, after interpreting some poems in class, my perspective began to shift (only slightly not significantly though). While I am still not the biggest fan of poetry, I am beginning to see a different side to it.  Yes, poetry is all of the negative things that I stated above (at least in my opinion) but once poetry is understood, the lesson becomes that much clearer and applicable. Understanding and correctly interpreting poetry is not only a beneficial skill to have but it also opens your eyes to a deeper understanding to things that are important in terms of culture, history, and etc. For example, poetry has effectively been used to advocate and teach about i...

Everlasting Mistakes: America Never Seems to Learn

America is essentially naive. We take what we want and we take what we have for granted. If something is going to propel our status up, whether it's for wealth, our social lives, or just out of selfishness, we don't seem to even hesitate to act. As we observe in Raymo's piece, the act of selfishness and naiveté is what drives their decisions, and eventually, will lead to their own death. The piece takes place in 1987, which is only around 25 years from when we learned how harmful cigarettes actually were. Just like in Raymo's piece when the six-year-old girl "rubbed the glowing dust on her body" not knowing that the "beautiful dust" would "damage her living cells" (Raymo 212) and kill her, our society did something quite similar and acted out of same naiveté. We did the same thing with tobacco and cigarettes and blindly rushed into using them because "they were cool" and "the new thing". Then once it was already too late...

"How Are You?" (I don't actually care though)

When we talk to people, we always seem to start our conversations with phrases such as, "how are you?" or "what's been going on with you lately?". But what is the purpose to asking these questions if the responses that we get back essentially don't mean anything to us? What are we getting from one-word answers like "good", "I'm fine", or just "yeah"? By nature, we ask these questions without actually caring about what the person answers back to us. However, I actually believe that these questions are of crucial use to us. For example, when your parents force you to meet someone like their "high school friend" and all you have to do is be polite, these questions are quite handy. You're able to fill awkward time and be polite at the same time. While it might seem cold-hearted to think this way, in reality, everyone does it. On the other hand, I'm sure there are some people who are asking these questions to ...