In recent events, there have been many incidents and conversations involving race. This article is not intended to patronize readers by any means, but to help people understand on a larger scale some common misconceptions of what is or isn't racist. I also do want to include that I, in no way, think that racism is okay or condone any different treatment of an individual due to the pigment of their skin. Here are a couple things to think about when an event occurs or a conversation is to be had that involves race.
Having friends of different races does not necessarily make you immune to racism. I have heard people say multiple times that because they have friends in the (insert race) community that it is impossible for them to be a racist. This is one of the biggest and sadly enough widely accepted myths. Just because you have an African-American friend does not mean that you refrain from involving race in your decisions toward other people. For example, if my best friend were Asian and I were to make a joke about how their math abilities are better because they are Asian, this is still a racist incident. Just because you are friends with a racial group does not make you immune to racism.
When it comes to incidents in the news that are committed by a race other than white, it is not okay to stereotype the whole race for one individuals actions. The most recent events involving race involve The Ohio State University where an 18 year-old student by the name of Abdul Razak Ali Artan rammed his car into a crowd of people and continued to step out of the car swinging with a butcher knife, hurting 11 people total. During the live stream of the event on Facebook, I looked at what people were commenting. The comment section made me humiliated to be a young white American. People were assuming that people of the white race never do this kind of thing and were commenting nasty explicit remarks about entire races and religions. This was an act of an individual, yet people who don't even believe in the same extreme values are fearing for their safety for an extremely valid reason. If it helps your mental clarity, people of the white race do commit these kinds of atrocities just as much if not more. Take Dylann Roof for example. Dylann Roof is a young white male (not that it should matter to us anyway) who walked into a church in Charleston, South Carolina and took the lives of nine innocent human beings with a gun.
This article isn't to point the finger back at a different race. This article is to point the finger at something that is a large factor in how we perceive other individuals that shouldn't be. The color of your skin doesn't make you act any differently or have an affect in the likelihood to commit an atrocity. I implore you next time you watch the news and events such as the ones listed above have occurred, to take the aspect of race completely out of your judgement. This will hopefully help you to realize that there truly only is one race, and that my friends is the human race.
