Haven't people realize that we live in the same planet?

Many people think that racism is part of history now. It’s part of the past, but even though when it looks like we have overcome it, this is not true. Sad to say, racism still exists today, and even worse is that from my personal perspective I don’t really believe that there is going to be a day when we will reach an equal treatment for everyone, well at least not the United States. When I say “at least not in the United States” I refer to the fact that many people who live in different countries don’t have to face this problem. The United States is the main country where people from different parts of the world come, and because of that I believe is the country that faces more with racism. For sure people have done a great progress, and the situation is so much better than it used to be back in the past and we can also keep working to make a difference, but this term of racism has been out there for so long that many people still do it either consciously or unconsciously.

Today during class we learned that among all people we have the active racists, who are the ones who are conscious of what they are doing, then we have the passive racists, who are the ones that differentiate people unconsciously or do nothing about a situation, and then we have the anti racists, which sad to say even though we have people that try to do something about it and help to overcome these kind of situations, these people are a very low percent of the population. All the rest of the population falls under the other two categories. As we can see this doesn’t help as much.

From my own experience, me as a Mexican, I didn’t have to face racism or even talk about it until I came to this country. In Mexico everyone was Mexican, everyone was the same, but then you come here and you find out that everyone seems to be different. I’ve seen people, not only from my country but also from different countries and different parts of the world treated differently just because of their race, and it’s not enough to live this in real life but they also have to show it in films. Here we have all these films that most of the time will show people from different races as the villains, servers, robbers, low class workers, making them inferior to others.

Today in class we watched “Boyz N The Hood”. It was hard to watch, and sad at the same time, but we clearly saw examples of racism in this movie. Some of the things that I noticed was that the teacher at the school was white, and something that really bothered me was when she mentioned the word “Indians” and then she changed it to “Native Americans”. Another thing that bothered me from her was when she called the mom of one of the boys and kept asking her questions in a rude way. Other quotes that we hear through out the movie were “black men have no place in the army” and “blacks own nothing”. Even though these came from black people, this was a reality back in those days. Like these movie we have lots more that keep giving out these messages that some races are inferior/superior to others.

I came to this country. I started to meet people from different cultures and parts of the world. Thanks God I never saw them inferior/superior to me. I saw everyone equal, because that’s the way we are. This is the way I was raised. I was raised to respect everyone, I was raised to see our differences as something special that each person has and not something that makes us inferior/superior to someone else, but of course not everyone thinks this way. We’ve been dealing with racism since the beginning of times, and until this point I still don’t see the end of it, will we reach that day when people realize that we live in the same planet?