terça-feira, 9 de abril de 2013

The Change of Mind: From Racism to Tolerance



Recently, in the International study class, we have been watching a movie. When people hear that, they automatically assume that the movie was kind o a free time, and the students might have to work on something else, like writing an essay. However, the movie we watched had a greater impact on us, students, than we expected. The movie, American History X, which has one of the scenes shown above (see Rotten Tomatoes review here), shows the utter ignorance of a particular group of Americans that live in LA. They are the neo-Nazi skinheads. The movie has as its protagonist Derek, a boy who was widely influenced by a man named Cameron to hate black people. As Derek grew up, the acts of intolerance grew as well, and started showing a complete and de-human hatred for (as quoted by the movie) “niggers”. Derek kills three black guys who were trying to kill his car stereo, and even though one of them was trying to run, he still killed him. The cold bloodiness of the scene was so shocking that it made all of the students in the room gasp in horror.
            During our course, we were also exposed to the pyramid of hate (shown bellow):
The pyramid of hate explained the different levels of hate that exist in the world, showing each step as a different category. But we can’t be blamed about that. Everyday society shows us that the white color is the right color. Even thought that may have sounded racist, it is the way things work (read more on it here). Racism is not something that we decide to feel or follow. We are exposed to us daily. Who has never seen a “skin color” band-aid that was black? No one. And it's something that is ridiculously shown on everyday life. These are some black people talking about white privilege and humoring about it:
Black people tend to be pulled up by cops in "blitz" stops, followed by police officers in malls and get weird looks when walking out of shops just because of a small prejudice that someone one day decided to create. There is a question that should be raised. Where does racism come from? Racism goes back all the way to the bible (read more on that here), and to it´s roots, which are basically slavery. Slavery was the kickoff start of racism, in my honest opinion. I wonder who looked at a black guy and thought "We white, fat folks are most definetly superior to these black guys". Please, that is extremely offensive. If I were a black guy at that time, I would for sure, try to tie one of those guys to a whipping post to show them how it feels. Obviously I wouldn't be able to do that. They outnumbered the black people and killed whomever tried to rebel, whicch is a violation of human rights, something that is present even nowadays (read about it here). The article just now mentioned talks about a police officer who shot an Asian woman and her Black Fiancee out of free will. This shows how the world can improve on this area. 
Bringing back the spotlight to the main topic, how can the change be made, from hate, to tolerance? It's not something that you can just google and find an answer too (yes, I did try). It's more complicated than that. Most of the human population are hipocrites by saying they are not racist at all. Everyone is racist, even if in the slightest. But not only white people, black people as well. There have been issues on which black people attack white guys due to this racism. There was this case on which a man was stabbed 5 times and brutally beaten up just because of a small misunderstanding between two guys (watch full video with awesome british accent). Now, the first step to move on from racism to tolerance is to recognize we are all the same. All of us bleed. All of us get hurt. All of us work with a brain and a heart? How are we even different from each other? What's the point for such nonsense? Why do people insist to fight over such a small matter such as skin color? Tolerance, it's not that hard to reach, just hard to understand. Think about it.