I'm not the best person to talk to when it comes to racism mostly because it hasn't played a large part in my life growing up but just because it hasn't been a problem for me doesn't mean its not a problem for others or our society. Yes everyone is different but we should all be equal because at the end of the day we are all Americans.
let me start this blog with a little background on myself. I am a 22 year white male from Eastern Utah who basically didn't have any first hand experience with large confections of race or racism until I came to college here at Dixie and became friends with people who had. I went to a small high school (roughly 130 people in my graduating class) were there were a large population of Hispanics and Latinos and Whites but they from my point of view got along pretty well. There is always going to be young people juiced up on hormones that are eager to provoke fights and conflicts but will that stage of adolescent ever pass? hopefully. A lot of people say racism is learned and passed down through parenting but how much of that is learned from the media and more importantly through social media.
The article I read that stuck me the most is this one that talks about how some people think that racism on the internet isn't real.
The people who I've been able to really call racist are older people I've worked around in construction instead of the high school kids who sit next to each other calling themselves racial slurs to gain a reaction from the students around them when the teacher isn't there. However this isn't the case with online interactions. I'm not sure if many of you are familiar with communication terms but the term face is used to describe how someone thinks they are seen by others. Your face is made up by how others perceive you as a person. This is done by information collected over time to establish knowledge of that person in order to reduce uncertainty about them. While online one can become anonymous. They have no other post, comments, or information about them so they are more free online to say whatever they want without hurting their “face”; so is that racist remark made by them reflecting who they really are? The content is real. It had to be typed into a computer and the post button had to be clicked. It might not be as prevalent on social media outlets like Facebook where you need to fill out your first and last name, but if you’ve ever scrolled through the comments of let's say a YouTube video ,where people can make up any user name, there isn’t a progressive topic of discussion. Its nothing but racial slurs, hate, and garbage coming out of the fingertips onto people's keyboards. We shouldn’t dismiss what we read online as “oh those are just angry, mad trolls on the internet looking to vent because everything thing on the internet is premeditated. They had to think about it and then type it out and then on top of all that press send. Its not like someone stubbing their toe and yelling out profanity, it's cold sought out racism that by all means is real. Just because it happens online doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Thanks for reading.
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