Reality of Racism

In the beginning of the week we started talking about racism and we went into this long conversation about how race is a socially constructed idea, not a biological fact. This didn’t surprise me because I learned it last year in human geography but it’s just a really interesting topic to think about. I mean everyone refers to race as if it’s an inborn characteristic of skin color; it’s just how people think. I means my own mom, when telling me about the Holocaust, said that Hitler was trying to turn a religion into a race. I was twelve at the time and asked what race was. She told me it’s a really complicated thing having to do with ancestry and skin color. I can’t make any generalizations about this because she was taught in the USSR, but it makes sense to me that others might think like this too. Race is a huge part of our culture; it has to be if a word such as racism exists. Racism is almost always perceived as one skin color against another, most associate racism with the civil rights movement. It’s just natural to think of race in this way, but what strikes me is that it’s natural to think of race at all. Who cares what color or ethnicity or whatever someone is? I feel like it’s just another in the mundane category of ways humans try to put themselves into smaller and smaller groups. Everyone wants to feel like they’re a part of something bigger, so why not make their category even larger by adding more to it. Race, age, gender, religion...etc...Kind of never ending isn’t it?