My Racist Experience

I have heard that everyone is a little racist, that's just how most people are raised. They subconcioulsy witness different reactions towards different races and treating them slighly differently. However, some are raised specifically that very offensive, and rude racism is acceptable, those people are racists.

I know some people who have been raised to believe that harsh racism is permittable. I know students that go to my school who have been raised such as this. Just this year I recall multiple experiences of witnessing racist comments.

Our school had african-american students for many years, and they were never attacked, or made fun of because of their race. However, this year another student of different race came to our school. Of course, since no one knew anything about him/her, he/she was a perfect target for the cruel, unnecassary racist jokes and comments that many people found humourous and simply laughed, or believed it was wrong, but kept quiet to themselves about it.

On one of the student's first days at school, another student decided to make very racist jokes about him/her. While in class, the new student was minding his/her own business, and The other student had decided to say "Watch out he might bomb us."

He didn't just stop after making one statement either, he had decided to nickname him a very stereotypical name, "Paco". He made quite a few very racist jokes about him/her over the next few days. However, I never decided to comment on these remarks, I just kept quiet knowing that the student who was being made fun of wasn't being made fun of to his/her face.

I believe I could have said something to the person who was making these harsh, unnecassary, racist comments but I felt as though I wasn't obligated to do so. I felt like someone else would have done something about it, preferably a teacher if it got out of hand.

If something such as this happened again I could either have simply said that comment wasn't necessary, or told someone such as a teacher what he said. And the teacher could keep watch on the student and assure it doesn't happen again.