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Race is everywhere. It’s stating the obvious, but it’s important to understand the significance of this. Especially now, while we learn about how race has affected people in Empire.

 

Like all things that are everywhere, we study race – it’s important to understand the things we see and interact with everyday. We study the molecules traveling in the air around us, the meaning of the words we speak, we even study how we know what we know. Schools were built to understand these elements of life on Earth so that it may be no surprise when we come across them in our lives. Ask anyone; they’ll remember that hated Natural Sciences class in middle school or the constant analysis of rhetoric in high school English.

 

What I find interesting about the study of race is that it is so ingrained in our society. At least for me.

 

In fifth grade, I had no idea what racism was. I knew race, in the terms that I was Asian, and there were certain names I couldn’t call certain groups of people. When our teacher read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee aloud to us, we had never listened to a story like that. He explained to us the significance of the story as he went along, saying that Tom Robinson was judged by his skin, and not his character. It was a valuable experience for all of us – our first exposure to race and racism.

 

You’d think that by now To Kill a Mockingbird is just a far-off memory for me, a jumble vocabulary that a 5th grader would question in more ways than one. I ended up reading the text three more times in middle school and high school. It came to the point where I was skirting the lines of self-plagiarism on essays and presentations on the novel, I had analyzed the book so many times. But each time the book was iterated in another course, the analysis was even deeper than before. The diverse perspectives that follow racism became stained into my head.

 

It wasn’t just that book though. Other books we read that we analyzed for race: Things Fall Apart; Maus; Night; Heart of Darkness; Cry, The Beloved Country; Huckleberry Finn. We didn’t have a course like Humanities Core that focuses on particular groups of people at the time. We didn’t have a course that highlighted the oppression of others. This was only high school English – we read these novels to further our analytical skills, yet somehow, race became a motif in the course. Courses like Theory of Knowledge and History went even further into the subject.

 

Maybe you’re thinking “man, this guy hates learning about race”. No, I think it’s good that race is being taught in-depth, whether it be deliberate or not. What I’m showing is that a lot of people grow up being familiar with race and racism; in my case, I’ve grown familiar with it through school. And it’s not just school, people grow up as victims of racism. Race plays a huge role in the news we see, movies, books (if I haven’t made this medium clear enough already), and music. In the end, we can’t run from the effect of race in our lives.

 

Let’s concentrate on racism. Learning about how racism has affected people, whether they be real or fiction, have helped me grow in empathy, and I’m sure others feel the same way. Ignoring it, and we see the unimpeded oppression that has been iterated in many areas in many times, as we have learned in Humanities Core. But what about racism in media, particularly reported in news?

 

Should acts of racism be reported? Yes, I think such things should not be kept under wraps. But there’s this particular toxicity seen in news media that follows reports on racism that makes me question the way popular media documents racism.

 

The Guardian article, “How should the media cover America's racist extremists?” helps answer my skepticism. In short, the article talks about how reporting racism with a certain ignorance can make it worse. It can lead other people to follow that racist movement, or mislead others into a cycle of misunderstanding, spreading more hate to those that have enacted hate.

 

In the end, something that is so integrated in our lives should be analyzed in multiple perspectives, a practice that I value in Humanities Core. With the media feeding us information, I believe it’s important for us to be weary of their reporting on race – both sides are human, and humans are inherently rational beings. Racism is terrible, but we can’t approach it with the same ignorance that allows it to thrive.