Required Entry: Race

When learning about race, especially your own, it becomes a sort of eye-opening moment. It’s the moment in where we begin to decipher how the world is and how people work. In our generation, we were raised inclusively and raised on the belief that America was sort of like a melting pot of many different ethnicities. However, we soon learn how the world actually works and sees each and every different race. Growing, up we see how older people talk about others and we take it into mind because we follow what we see and hear. With that being said, when talking to older people about their perspective of their race, they had different stories than younger people today. They answered with having traumatizing events that would make them frightful and described America as something completely different than what it is today. Back then, when you saw someone with a different skin color or face structure or body structure, it was normal to judge them and categorize them into what you thought their race was. In doing so, it defeated the purpose of the foundations in which America was created. The older people in which I talked to talked about how in grade school, others would come up to them and immediately judge them because of how they looked or spoke. This was an effect of the ignorance of race from society at the time. However, as race has become a more open subject, as we become older, we learn that not everyone is as they seem. You may look at a person with a paler skin color but they may be Latinx or Puerto Rican. The younger people in which I spoke with mentioned how in order to determine others race they take initially what they see but further ask them about their background instead of going off of sole assumptions. Race has become a more understandable concept in which many people are affected daily because of their origins.