Racism // Breakdown

Racism sucks.

If you're from just about everywhere else in the US, where people of color are underrepresented, you'd be startled the first time you walked into my school.

My class, for example. Almost everyone is Asian or Hispanic, and we have one half-Caucasian kid. That's it. I've grown up in a community where the white race is a minority. California, by a wide margin, is definitely a state with high minority populations. Because of that, I'm lucky enough to lack experience with racism, as a person of color, firsthand.

It's true: segregation still does exist, but subtly. When I read an article about the advertisement for the beauty brand SheaMoisture, I discovered that one of the facts they'd presented was something I'd noticed before, but hadn't thought much of. Their products, which are meant for curly, natural hair, are located in a separate "ethnic" beauty section. That's segregation right there. Is "ethnic" less beautiful (of course not)? Why does it have to be located elsewhere? Natural hair is gorgeous, but the other moral of the story: beauty aisle segregation, though sneaky, isn't okay. 

There are so many other ways that the beauty world has demoted women of color (think back to when one critic said that Zendaya's Oscar hairstyle, dreads, looked like they "would smell like weed," even though she put the critic in her place and a Barbie doll was modeled after the look). Or even the time one social media troll told half-white, half-Indian singer Charli XCX her skin "looked dirty." Or the time a student, who usually wears her hair in braids, let her natural, curly hair out; her teacher said her hair was "poofy" and "unprofessional" and that "no one would hire her with hair like that."

Think about it: people of color are paid less than Caucasians. While it's primarily based off of education, there'll still be a wage gap between a person of color and a Caucasian with the same educational background. For every dollar a white man makes, a Asian woman will make 90 cents, a white woman will earn 78 cents, a Native American/Pacific Islander woman will be paid 65 cents, an African-American woman 64 cents, an American Indian/Alaska Native woman 59 cents, and a Latina/Hispanic woman 54 cents.

Something that's always nagged me, though not direct racism, is the assumption that America is black-and-white. There's more than two races - "person of color" doesn't translate to "African-American." I do recognize that our country's unfortunate history of racial discrimination mostly had to do with African-Americans, but that was then and this is now. A group of people is not diverse when African-Americans and Caucasians alone are included; it's when African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, Caucasians, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Pacific Islanders are. Do the math: there's a significant difference between two races and six. Call me oversensitive, but that's something I felt the need to address. 

The world isn't divided into good people and racists (did you get that Sirius reference?) Oh, I had to bring Harry Potter into this. The wizarding world's initial, derogatory perception of house-elves, along with the whole blood purity concept, is based on racism and slavery in our world. Even characters we know are amazing, amazing people - like Ron and Sirius - can sometimes show little respect for house-elves, and I think that was J.K. Rowling's way of pointing out that everybody can be racist sometimes. Don't dismiss racism by saying, "I'm not a racist, so why does it matter?" Great people say offensive things, too.

Hope you enjoyed that opinion post - if there's anything else you want to say, do!

Breakdown's a series I've created for all my opinion posts :)