Definition of Racism

This poem is unique and one of a kind. Zaheed Patel shows the many situations in which racism comes about. Discrimination doesn’t just come about for any reason; someone has to initiate this view/thought, this why I choose this poem. It mainly starts when colored men or women strive in life to be something. Something more than eternal slaves on a white mans premises. In this poem, essentially anyone who is not black would agree that colored people are not to gain wisdom and congregate with others than their own kind; when they do they are discriminated against. There is thought to be no place for a colored man making decisions in a white mans world. The last paragraph in the poem says that:

Just because he is black and not a pretty white woman
They look down disrespectfully at him like a felon
In their hearts they consider it reality
They are all over-superior to black

Over history woman have become more of an importance in the white mans life, therefore, becoming more accepted. Unfortunately, for the black people this is not true. Some white people would say that they don’t’ see this discrimination happening. There privilege of denial has overcome their thought that racism is a dead thought.

The whole poem relates to our class, but this obliviousness is what I am going to focus on. In our class we have discussed the basics of how racism became and how it spread all over the world, but that’s not all we’ve learned. We have focused on many side facts about race. Like in this poem how racism still continues today with no end in site. One of the main factors to this is the absolute obliviousness of white folks to discrimination. The poem quotes:

Racism is not always obvious
Discrimination to those who do not care is oblivious
Discrimination to those who have never been there is oblivious

What this section is saying is that people who don’t care about racism may have this belief because they either don’t witness it, or because they have the “privilege” to not care. As we discussed in Getting Off the Hook: Denial and Resistance if you are a white male or female you posses some privileges over black men and women. Choosing to ignore discrimination because you can is a privilege, but some whites are just fortunate to not even witness racism at all. Many white’s who have this belief tend to live in the north where there was/is less slavery and more segregation of blacks and whites. If a white child was born with blacks in his neighborhood as his friends then he would have no reason to discriminate.

Either of these ways tries to constitute the fact that discrimination is oblivious. From denial to straight-up ignorance people can try to put this topic off as long as they want. But, after sitting down and taking the time to look around, and as I discovered through this ethnic studies class, racism has been here for a while and will tend to linger around for a long time to come.

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