I’ve always considered myself to be an accepting, open-minded, and relatively nonjudgmental person. I grew up in a progressive household in California and I never really thought about race other than in terms of identifying where a person’s ancestors originated from. In terms of the government, like every other American child, I “learned” in school at an early age that America is a country that fosters diversity and is accepting of a wide range of people. Though I was taught about the horrors of slavery and the exploitation of Native Americans by early settlers, between the information presented to me as a child and my own experience I always got the impression that racism is no longer a real issue in the United States. If anything, I believed that our country’s main issue regarding racism was its failure to accept responsibility for past actions and ideologies.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized it was this exact mentality that allows racism to continue to run rampant within our society and within the structure of our government. Color blindness, the latest form of "acceptable racism" in American society, describes an ideology in which we believe in the notion that there are no races and we are all the same. Though it sounds pleasant in theory, ignoring race altogether and denying that we are different in culture and history also denies the persistence of racism that still exists in the world and the exploitation of people of color in the past. White Americans claiming that they "don’t see race" and that they see people of color as no different from themselves strips the cultural identity from minorities who continue to be marginalized by the government and society.

Additionally, by saying that there are no races and that we’re all the same in this country holds people of color up to the same standards as white Americans when they don’t have the same societal advantages and/or resources. This is where we get the notion that we can all “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” and be successful in America. While there are certainly successful people of color in the US, this is due to extraordinary circumstances rather than privilege, as is the case with white Americans.

What many people don’t realize, what I didn't realize for the first part of my life, is that racism is still very much present in modern America. In fact, though our country is known for being the land of the free, we are actually a country built upon racism. Our history began with the exploitation of people of color for their resources, a lack of rights for these same people, and the authoritarian rule of white men who were deemed the only ones capable of making decisions for the population. I will admit that we can all agree we’ve come a long way in terms of acceptance and liberty for the American population as a whole, rather than just the people who decided they should count as citizens. It is true that everyone who lives as a legal citizen of the US has civil rights, basic human rights. It is true that, technically, under the eyes of the law, all citizens are equal. Does this mean that racism no longer exists within the framework of our society, our government?

Though some people might argue this to be true, the reality of life for many people of color disproves it.

The fact of the matter is that racism continues to be omnipresent in our society in a wide variety of forms under a list of guises that attempt to rename the same issues we were dealing with as a country two hundred years ago. The way the American government is structured continues to benefit whites and hurt people of color. It’s a vicious cycle that is blamed on the very people it’s hurting. Most people of color are born into poor or impoverished families who live in impoverished neighborhoods within urban landscapes that are ignored by the state, and by extension the federal government. In these impoverished areas, the children go to under-funded schools where their quality of education is typically a lot lower and they’re much more exposed to crime. Due to their low income and lack of access to federal assistance, many children of people of color will not attend college. They will then either enter the work force or will engage in criminal activity, out of necessity or exposure.

Statistically, the people of color who commit crimes as adults will receive much harsher punishments than white adults will for the same crimes. This leads to our jails and prisons filling up with primarily poor people of color who will then find it nearly impossible to get a decent paying job if and when they are allowed to return back to society. Without the advantage of having a decent paying job, stuck in the same poor neighborhood they were born into, they’re likely to remain in the crime cycle and return to jail within five years of release.

I understand that this is not the case for every person or family of color. However, this is an example of a scenario that is often played out in present day American society. Our culture rewards those who are born into advantageous circumstances, whiteness being the best one of them. When you’re white, even if you’re born into the same economic situation as a person of color, you automatically have the advantage of not being presumed to be a certain way. You’re not labeled before you even have the chance to make any decisions in life.

When you’re white, your decisions matter here. When you’re not, you’re just another statistic.

So I encourage you to start a conversation about these problems, to provoke thought about the way our social norms and government are structured and how it affects American citizens on a daily basis. With color blindness being on the rise in present society, people are having fewer and fewer critical conversations and things aren’t changing. The less aware people are of racial issues, the more they’ll assume they don’t exist. Don’t let the fact that you may not personally experience racism prevent you from questioning it.

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