Tyler Valentine AAS 201 September 8,2017
Critical Reflection Paper
Racism isn’t apparent in one’s life until one has felt it firsthand. It’s a wake up call, like when a
kid is old enough to understand that life isn’t all about having fun. It changes your whole perspective on life and hits you hard, because it contradicts everything in your life up to this point. Racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior. It’s easy to see how folks can be proud and confident of their race to the point of thinking it’s better than others to the point of discriminating. People don’t like change or are scared of it which is why families in the past have been unwilling to let their sons or daughters marry outside of their race. People have a hard time letting different in, because they don’t trust it due to the lack of experience they have with it. People fear or degrade what they don’t know. This is something we can all say we have done so when we talk about race we must understand that it’s natural to feel attributes of being a racist. Excluding something that is different is a natural human attribute. Racism has never gone away, it has just transformed, this is how it’s transformed and stayed relevant in the life of an Asian American teen in 2017.
My first memory of race was in kindergarten. It was my first day of elementary school. This school was located in south central and was a predominantly black school. All of my black classmates huddled around me and started touching my hair. Nothing was special or off about my hair. It’s the usual thin Asian hair which wasn’t too long. I went home to ask my mom why everyone was touching my hair and she said because those kids had never seen or met an Asian before. This intrigued me, because I’d never been singled out because of my race. This shows the difference between the young and old, when the young see something new they are attracted to it when the old see something new they are scared and cautious of it.
The first real encounter I had with racism was senior year of high school. My controversial unfiltered AP Literature teacher decided to share to the whole class that oriental and illegal alien were not offensive terms. Most of my classmates weren’t Asian and the ones who were didn’t understand that, the term was a term used derogatory toward Asians. And he just got away with it. No one stood up to what he said except for myself and when I confronted the comments in front of the class, he replied to me with a smart aleck remark which found myself being laughed at in front of the class. I found myself having to explain myself to multiple classmates why I was angered or offended by the term. The term is similar to Negro which refers to the black community as they were during slavery. Oriental refers to asians as they were when they first came over, unwanted, overworked, underpaid, not having equal rights. These terms, Oriental and Negro, were even outlawed by the Obama Administration in the writings of federal laws. The scary part about this was that high school seniors didn’t know that this was an insult. Asian Americans didn’t have it easy when they first immigrated here, similar to the early Latinos and Irish immigrants, but somehow Latino, Irish, African stories are taught in classrooms, but Asians aren’t. Ignorance about race allows others to impose dominance amongst others.
Racism has been relevant in my life seeing that my stepdad is black. Certain things my mom and I can’t do with my step dad or we have to do for him. He’s treated differently and looked at differently when we are out in public. I don’t think it’s coincidence that every time we go to a nice restaurant with him they try seating us near the bathroom. My own Asian grandma doesn’t even know about my step dad because she is racist and wouldn’t allow it. Stereotypes which cause my grandma to not approve of black also lead to folks expecting me to be good at math. When people meet me they don’t expect me to listen to rap music, play basketball, and have a black stepdad.
The stigmatism of Ferguson Missouri shows how racism still lives and is real. A white cop kills an unarmed African American and doesn’t get indicted. A lot of folks still have a racist attitude or don’t mind racism as we saw by the election of our current president. This goes back to the civil rights
movement and it’s impression on a lot of older folks of color. The link to the first website expressed how in the classrooms we must start teaching kids about the activist such as Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X,. This reminds me of when I asked my step dad what his grandmother’s view was on the civil rights leaders, he replied clearly stating that they believed they were troublemakers. He states that this was the tone or belief of most elderly or older blacks during the civil rights movement. A lot of the black community just wanted to live their lives in peace which couldn’t be accomplished with the uproar started by these activist. This goes with my chinese grandmother as well. She saw the news back then and interpreted it as the African Americans are trouble makers. The media then until now shows majority of black crime, which has shaped the ideology most older people have of black people. So racism is still well alive, it has just transcended into less radical expressions and more institutionally shown. Look at our prison systems. Look at the white house staff. Look at the war on drugs which was just a plot to criminalize black folks and throw them in jail. Both of the links to the websites brought awareness to how people have been influencing and spreading the Black Lives Matter movement, but it mainly talks about educating the young. I understand we must target the young and remind them of historic events which shaped today’s civil rights, but the young are easier to convince. The people we need on board is the older generations, they have money, they have influence over their families, and they still have a vote. The young people we educate who become activist put pressures on the older generation to help make change, but they do that for only the older people in power, like the politicians who write policy. The people who need to be targeted are the old people stuck in there old ways. The faster we get folks to set aside racist thoughts, the faster racism will end.
From my life as a second generation Asian American I’ve seen how the young aren’t the ones who are afraid and build barriers between races. In kindergarten they showed me that the young embrace others differences. In high school I was shown how the educational system leaves my people history in the dark and don’t talk about their struggle in the states as they do with other immigrant races. And
through my family experiences I’ve seen how black people are still treated differently even though we live in the 21st century. Through this I’ve seen that the Black Live matter movement has brought more attention in educating the youth on the past civil rights movements and how we can use that knowledge to help us today, I believe we must also be targeting the elderly population and educating them as well.