Racism Essay

For me the racism unit was hard. It wasn’t that I couldn’t grasp the information or complete the work, the problem was that in soaking in and listening to what everyone else was saying it was somewhat difficult for me to form my own voice into coherent thoughts. I liked this essay because it gave me the opportunity to really think and reflect on what I wanted to say in a more poetic way. What I love about this essays is that it is probably the most honest thing that I have written in the CAP. I used my own writing voice unlike other essays where I adopt a more scholarly tone. For the essay, which is entitled, Your privilege, and my lack thereof, I chose to focus on on the topic of white privilege which is something that affects me and pretty much every black person in america everyday in small ways that add up. I used a combination of my own personal experiences, current events, and research that we were provided to write a reflection on this topic. In writing this I felt that making it a rant about how white privilege had personally affected me wasn’t enough, as a black person talking about race you often have to substantiate your claims about race (which I also found through my research) so I used multiple sources with different examples of white privilege, and how it affects not only on black people but people of all race.

In some ways I wanted this to be an angry paper but as I was writing it and talking about my personal struggles and those of so many black Americans across the country it became a sad paper. I was consumed by a sense of of despair and to a certain extent, helplessness. The essay asked us what the next step to eradicating racism are. As I was writing the paper the next steps seemed bleak, it seemed like black people were doing so much to try and increase their status in america but that the movement was leading nowhere. Looking back, that’s what I would change, I would try to make the message more hopeful. There are so many fights going on right now that are slowly making changes in the way black people are viewed and treated in this country. In this unit and especially in writing this paper I realized how big of a role white privilege played in my education especially here in CAP. This has led me and some other classmates to begin working on our own cause to help minorities in magnet programs who invariable face white privilege just by being in an environment that is majority white.

The biggest thing I learned through writing this essay, which is largely a documentation of how much race negatively affects me everyday in small but meaningful ways it occurred to me how important it is to be aware of your race and how it can affect your everyday interactions and what being a certain race means in terms of how you will be treated. I also realized that white privilege is something that continually surrounds us and how rooted it is in everybody's lives even if they don't realize it. White privilege seems like such a small inconsequential topic that only would help white people a small amount but in reality it has some huge implications on how blacks will succeed and whether or not we will be able to rise. The biggest lesson I learned in doing research on this topic and reflecting on my own experience with it was that as long as white privilege exists we as blacks are going to have to work that much harder to overcome it.