Journal Week 5
What does it mean to be white in America? Being American has different implication for people specially depending on their ethnicity. Why don’t you go concur the world ? No white man is standing between you and your dreams. Why don’t you try harder? Why don’t you stand on your ground? I’ve encountered this attitude many times specially from white people. As if it’s hard for white people to view the world from other perspectives and truth to be told, they never had to because it’s a white men’s world. People of color know exactly what it feels to view the world from a white man view because they encounter racism so many times. They are aware how they think about people from different races. It’s hard to understand others when the world is set up to be yours. As a white man, you’re already a ahead of the game when you come into his world just because of the color of your skin and that is, my friend, privilege. But what does it take for us, as human beings, to try and understand each other and validate each other’s experiences and views in life? It’s important to understand our experiences in this world is not absolute.
It is for sure a terrifying to think we live in a world that your kid as a teenager can get killed by the police. We don’t want to believe it and we don’t want to think about it because it makes us feel unsafe. But the fact is that most African American households have to talk to their teenage boys about how to act around the police and public in general just to stay alive. Our experiences as Americans can be drastically different because of racism in this country. Life in America has been set up in a way to give a push for whites and give setbacks to others, especially black people. There has been systemically oppression when it comes to certain races in America and that simply can’t be ignored. Racism is not a switch that we can turn off in a day. Just because people have the right to vote doesn’t mean everything is fixed. Racism is systematic problem in this country, it is imbedded in everything and anything. It takes awareness, openness, and venerability to understand that our experiences in this life is not the same. It also takes courage to come out of your comfort zone and to validate other experiences and feelings so we can have a country in which everyone has an equal chance to succeed.
