By Tejinder Sidhu
Racism has been a problem in our society for as long as we can remember from the attempted extermination of the Jews during World War II to the modern day racist jokes said by comedians. Like an infectious disease, racism spreads from one affected person to another, so where is the solution?
Unlike other people who believe that racism can be stopped by treating people equally, and ignoring what makes us different, I believe we should embrace them! Instead of favouring afrocentric schools, we should be encouraging the growth of public schooling. Instead of shying away from interracial relationships, we should be all for it! Because in the end, there’s no running away and if we don’t learn to embrace each other, we will eventually clash.
There are already examples of different races clashing with each other everyday. The genocide happening in Sri Lanka between the Singhalese and Tamils. The Iraq War. Racism is a global issue that affects everyone around the world, and has the same effect on them-feeling embarrassed and humiliated. Racism also adds bias to a person’s decision and affects them from making the right decision. For example, once when I was in a line for the amusement park, I accidentally bumped into this lady due to the crowding inside the line. This lady then proceeded to give me dirty looks and tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I should watch where I was going. If the situation was just this, I wouldn’t have minded but what shocked me was that when another pair of Caucasian teens bumped into her, she did not say a word to them.
Believe it or not, I think comedians like Russell Peters are doing a great job at solving racism. While it seems like Russell Peters is actually encouraging racism with his racist stereotypes and such, I like how he takes our differences and finds a way for everyone to laugh at it. Jokes such as the ones said by Russell Peters are effective at making everyone comfortable with each other’s differences as long as everyone knows that it’s just a joke and isn’t necessarily a true reflection on everyone.
I think that racism occurs because all races appear different from each other - different from what we’re used to and it’s well known that people don’t like change. So because of this, they try to stay away from each other which is the reason why attempts at raising awareness about equality only make us feel more alienated from each other. The solution to racism can be done in small steps by encouraging public schooling where kids are forced to interact with people of different races, and instead of raising awareness about equality (something that we all know about its just that some of us choose to ignore it) - show examples of successful groups or people who are of different races and worked together to do something great. Lastly, I think instead of treating racism with a serious approach, we should take a comedic approach to this and learn to laugh at ourselves.
Tejinder is a grade 11 student from Toronto and hopes to make a difference in the world through writing.
I must comment, this is a topic, I am so passionate about. I think Tejinder very correctly identified that eliminating racism is about accepting differences of cultures, races, religions, etc. A very nice read for the morning!
ReplyDeleteI am writing a paper on racism today and this is a very accurate point.
ReplyDeleteTejinder, this is a second time I am raeding this post and second time that I am commenting on it. I just noticed, that you wrote that the Jews were exterminated during world war II owing to racism. However, I must comment that Jews were not the only target.
ReplyDeleteGo to Wikipidea, and under the title of "Adolf Hitler", read the subsection "Holocaust":
Here is the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
I must comment that nowadays, Israel is doing to the Palestinians exactly what Hitler did to a lot of people. Yes, casualities are on both sides but most of the time Israel is the aggressor. One need to only read all relevant news (from around the world, and not just filtered CNN and CBC) to figure this out. There is an effort on behalf of certain groups to make it look like that Holocaust was only "targetted killing of the Jews". However, this is not the case. Histoy tells us so.