Be the Change You Want to See

Last week we ended class on an interesting topic. The topic was how would a black person react if a white person walked towards them and asked to learn about them because they were black, how would they respond. When Asked, Chris and Codey said something along the line of ignoring the person. I see why they would both react that way but I think it's because of that attitude that today we still have so many racial issues. The attitude of label anyone who makes a somewhat racist remark as a racist won't solve racism. As weird as it sounds, I would sit down with the person, calmly explain to them that they can't approach a person in that manor and tell them about myself and try to learn about them. I would do that because I believe people are naturally good and sometimes say dumb shit. That doesn't necessary mean that they are racist. If that person was racist, they wouldn't be approaching me in the first place. I think it is important for us to be able to distinguish racism and ignorance. You might not be able to change a racist person but you can do something about an ignorant person. If we just label everyone as just racist then, those who are genuinely not racist would just get piss and the miscommunication cycle would just keep on continuing. Just like Aastha pointed out in class the other day, sometimes we just need to be the bigger person by trying to understand where a person is coming from, and I totally agree with that.

Things are just not fair!

It's amazing what humans have achieve. We went from hunters and gatherers to sending a man on the moon. But we seem not able to have answer for issues such as racism? Are we ever going to be able to fix this problem? I think to answer this we have to keep in mind that our whole existence is based on things being different and not always being equal. One characteristic we possess that is really hurting our society is the ability to distinguish and greed. By distinguish things we usually place values on them which leads to greed and that leads to creating conflict. Acting on conflict does resolve things, it just leads to us going back to where we started. Monarchy and democracy are pretty much the same thing. They only differ in the sense that in democracy the public has at least some kind of power than in monarchy but one man still has control. The same thing goes for slavery and white privileged. I think they're pretty much the same things. the only difference is that today we don't the direct oppression of black people. Black people have physical freedom but their social freedom is limited. I don't blame white people for being privileged and I don't think anyone should. They weren't the cause for it. They just happened to be born black just like Blacks, Asians, and Latinos happened to be what they are. White people should be willing to give up some of their powers on their own will. Because forcing them to give it up just won't work it'll lead to another form of control. Instead of blaming, we should make white people realize.

Hello, my name is Gnoleba Hans Seri and I'm know by everyone as simply Hans. Growing in the Ivory Coast, in Africa racism was not an issue to me mainly because everyone look the same. Although there was I didn't grow up with racism, there was a lot of discrimination in my country. There are 60 different ethnic groups in my country and each one speak a different language. The northern part of my country is mostly Muslim due to Arab influences and the southern part christian. as a child leaving in the southern portion of the country, I was thought to dislike and fear the Muslim of my country due to their religion and culture, but I was never able to do it. I always tried to put myself in the other person's shoes and try to understand what they're going through. My wish was finally fulfilled when I moved to the U.S. and became the victim of not only discrimination but also racism. I'm taking this class to better understand other people's way of life and to get better cultural understanding of the world, and I hope this class turns out to be an awesome experience.