Monday, April 2, 2012

Not Just MInorities

"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this in a letter from his Birmingham jail cell in 1963. That was 49 years ago and even though some of the prejudice that the majorities throw to the minorities, there is growing prejudice inside the majorities. People need a scapegoat, and now that in can't be the minorities they turn to people who are just like them, whether it be their friends or their enemies.

There are several cases of this prejudice inside the majority. Sometimes it's just the little. "I hate you!"
"I hate you more!" you so commonly see in most elementary schools, but it can escalate into beatings, killings, fights, and suicide. Is this issue really that new? Maybe bullying in schools hasn't gone on that long but this is just the same as what we saw when Martin Luther King was writing from his jail cell for realizing that something wasn't right about the way black people were being treated, or like Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird who was going to be put to death for something he didn't do, no matter what he said. The only reason this school problem is being recognized as something else is because no one wants to recognize that we are doing those horrible tings to each other. We discriminate, we try to make others feel bad so we can feel better, we did that along time ago, but no one tried to battle it back then, no one thought it was wrong, no one recognized that this was a serious problem, but they do now because now it's within them.

If the world was lucky enough to one day have Martin Luther King Jr. come back to life, he would first admire how far the country had come because of him, and then he would realize that his work is not done today, but this time it's not from white to black, it's within the white community.

1 comment:

  1. I really like how you take on such a controversial topic in your writing. Your style of writing makes it easy to read and follow along with your thought process. In the body paragraph, I'd like to see you work to incorporate simple, short sentences for effect. The last sentence, run-on aside, has a lot of excellent information, but it could be improved by varying your sentence lengths. Starting with a simple "We discriminate." would really emphasize the point you're trying to get across.

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