I consider myself very lucky, I grew up in an extremely diverse area and I spent my developmental years around kids from all different cultures. However, being a white kid I never really understood the whole premise of racism, and to be completely honest, even as an adult I still don't get it, and that's because I have never experienced it. This didn't come to my attention until very recently.

I was helping my older sister, who is an elementary music teacher, teach her classes on Musical Theatre. We were talking about Wicked and we would bring up how Elphaba was discriminated against simply because of her color, and how that's not an okay thing to do. This went all fine and dandy until we were presenting to fifth grade, we brought up the anti-greenness the people of Oz had going on and how being mean to someone based on the color of their skin isn't okay. That's when a little African American girl pipes up "wow, that sounds familiar." Brittany went on with the lesson without a hitch, but I was taken aback by this little girl's comment.

This is a very divisive time in America, and lots of younger children are being exposed to this division thanks to social media as well as the news. Hate is being dished out on social media like they're beads in a Mardi Gras parade, and this is unacceptable. Scrolling through Twitter today I saw nasty and hateful comments on the most harmless of posts. The genius behind @weratedogs shouldn't be getting cursed out because he posted a picture of a hippo as a joke.

Generation Z is hands down one of the most technologically dependent, and by using all of this technology, these kids are guaranteed to come across some form of hate, and this, in my opinion is unacceptable. If kids start seeing more and more of this, then they are going to start believing that this is an okay way to treat those around them. And spoiler alert, it's not okay. My mom always reminds me, even to this day "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it." This is something that all of us need to remember when we get ready to press post on that comment to a tweet or on our Facebook walls.