This nation is fully aware of its long history of racism and discrimination. Ever since, missionaries went to Africa, to force the Africans to follow Christianity. As a result, black people were kidnapped from their native homes, to be sold as slaves in the U.S. They suffered horrible living conditions, brutal possessors, and terrible treatment. Once Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, the south secedes from the U.S, because he was an abolitionist. A Civil War had begun between The Abolitionist North and the Southern Slave owners; Lincoln announced that this war meant to end slavery. The North won and the South faced dire consequences, such as military supervision. However, the victims of slavery are the ones who lost in this war. Even when the North wanted to end slavery, they treated blacks as horribly and often shamed from their society. A famous court case, Plessey V. Ferguson, allowed the this treatment of blacks with their most notable statement, “separate, but equal”, thus creates the discrimination and racism that ruled for 60 years, ended by the civil rights movement. Today’s day and age black citizens still suffer the never-ending racism that believed to be abolished 50 years ago. Racism has now progressed into other races and even to the white citizens themselves. Ta-Neshi Coates, “The Good, Racist People,” Eugene Robinson, “Black boys denied the right to be young,” and Masha Gessen, “A Kind of Racism We’re Not Used To,” each states their claim on the topic of racism. Coates, Robinson, and Gessen discuss how racism is a subject that is predominately, negatively active, affecting people, especially young ones, today.
George Zimmerman, a white/Hispanic male, shot Trayvon Martin, a 17 year-old black male, to death because he was a threat. Even though there has been countless of evidence that points out that Martin was never a threat, but an act of over 200 years of deep-rooted racism. An investigation occurred and resulted in the trial of George Zimmerman on the count of second degree-murder, for which he was acquitted by the decision of the jury, not a single black person participated. This decision received a public outcry, even President Obama commented about this decision, all with the same topic, racism. Racism affects the youth; those who are affected “are not allowed to be children.” Robinson uses this case as an example to support his claim that black male can never be young and free, due to racism. Racism allows people to believe that black teenagers are not “children”, but full pledged, menacing adults that should dealt with in the most brutal manner. In which history also supported his claim, with the Jim Crow Laws South to Little Rock Nine to the Greensboro Sit In to the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., these events had the same issue, racism and civil rights. Trayvon Martin was not a “menacing kid”, but a victim of this racism. Caring only a bag skittles from a 7-11 and was shot as a threat, not because he had a weapon, but by the color of his skin.
Racism is found in every street in every city. Not only in the justice, like Robinson discussed, but also in common, public places. It has been migrated from the South in the mid to late 1800s to everywhere in the U.S. Coates uses the Forest Whitaker incident as evidence to convey that racism is lively, but “invisible” in this nation. Forest Whitaker, an Oscar-winning actor, was suspected of shoplifting in a Deli near Columbia University because of the color of his skin. The Deli later apologized by saying “it was a ‘sincere mistake’ by a ‘decent man,’” in which Coates believes it is an excuse for racism that is has been occurred for so long it almost seems innocent. Coates then uses this example, “..a white president forced to show his paper…white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home… Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli” to provide support for his claim by stating that white citizens do not get the same harassment from society, such as black people do. In which he then states, “’don’t leave home, they don’t want you around,’…propagated by moral people” conveying that society have been accustomed to racism for so long that it seems a minimal act of, an act that does not question any moral value.
Unlike Coates and Robinson, Gessen discusses her own racism, racism of white citizens, in which society has referred to “Reverse Racism”. Gessen , white Jewish and Russian woman, who had never experienced racism because of the color of her skin. She was a journalist who traveled to her native country, Russia, and migrated back to the United States several years later with her children. She was conversing with another white woman, who explained to her that she has been a victim of racism by people in Harlem. Gessen is puzzled due to the fact that she believe to be immune to racism, being in the “powerful majority.” Racism had been practiced so much; it divides races that here is minimal of hope of living together equally. Racism is like a disease, it is contagious and hard to contain, and if it is loose, it affects everybody, in this case, the hearts and mind of people. She then discusses an experience her daughter had with reverse racism; her daughter was enjoying herself at the park, when a dark-skin man used racist remarks to her, and another experience she had hiring a nanny, a Russian nanny who used racist remarks against Latino and Black nannies. Gessen uses this example to convey that racism has been around for so long, it has been apart of America’s culture, that it is a term that “we’re used to”, which is what Coates has been discussing.
Racism will never go away. Society has deemed to be an instinct, which it is not. Racism has been affecting people negatively. For Blacks, Coates and Robinson discussed, or for whites, Gessen discussed. Even though Coates, Robinson, and Gessen discuss racism, using their own experiences, they all have the same idea, that racism is predominately, negatively affecting people. Martin, Whitaker, and Gessen’s daughter are victims of this active crime. History itself is full of racism; this great nation, a nation full of opportunities, has hidden a dark secret, which deceives immigrants who came for a better life, only to find that racism is active and will prevent that chance.
