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Deron Zierer

Ms. Kise

11/19/2017

Word Count: 2716

Racism is a touchy subject to say the least, racism in America an even touchier one.

Many people are quick to say that racism in America is gone, that it hasn't changed, or that it's

something that can never change. It is true that in modern America institutionalized racism does

not nearly hold as much sway as it once did, however it does still exist in some aspects of how

society that the general population seems to deny knowing about. Racism is still very much a

part of American society, but the modern-day problem is that now people may not even know it.

After the Civil Rights movement most, right wing America seems to think that

minorities have now all been given just as much of a chance to succeed in America as they do.

This mind set is what leads to the shunning of any citizen who is willing to point out that

inequality, prejudice, and racism still is very much alive in the United States. Yes, not every

court ruling or police shooting is an example of racism, but when you begin to look at the big

picture you slowly start to realize that there is still a problem. It's not just that Mexicans are too

lazy to get a job, or that African- Americans are all on drugs and involved in gang activity. It's

that in America there is currently a second Civil Rights movement happening, and the sooner we

can acknowledge that as a nation the sooner we can work to fix our nation before it is broken.

Like in many situations the problem here is that there is little to no communication between the

multiple sides of the issues. Too the majority of white Americans they are simply responding to

anger with anger, this anger may stem from an almost subconscious racist attitude, but it is still
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their nonetheless. This though can also be said of the multiple minority groups that are

attempting to fix these racial problems, who feel cheated by society, and take drastic measures

by blaming all of society for the lot they've been dealt in life. The point I am trying to make here

is that racism in America does still very much exist, even though society as a whole may not

know it.

Before we dive deeper into this issue I find it necessary to define racism. In Racism by

Albert Memmi he describes how people with racist ideologies have their philosophy defined by 3

basic arguments.

''1. Pure races exist, each distinct from the others, implying that meaningful biological

differences exist between groups and the individuals that compose them.

2. Pure races are biological superior to those that are not pure, and this superiority brings

with it as well a psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual superiority.

3. These multiple superiorities both explain and legitimize the dominance and the privilege of

the superior groups. '' (Memmi 5-6).

Memmi presents this philosophy of a racist to allow the reader to see how a person with

racist attitudes actually think. Later on, though he does give a clearer, and interesting

definition of racism. ''All social affairs presuppose a reciprocal dependence between their

participants. But fear, hostility, and aggression are also aspects of human interactions. With

regard to the other, each one of us is capable of both positive and negative reactions. In that

sense, racism manifests a failure of relations with the other.'' (Memmi 26). This

understanding of racism is interesting to me, because it does not place the blame on any one
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group of people, whether that group be a racial or a social one. Memmi simply defines racism

as a failure of relations between people.

While there has always been Civil Rights leaders throughout the history of the United

States it seems too often come in leaps. Every so many years the flood gates burst open, and this

allows some real change to occur. The last time this happened would have been the Civil Rights

Movement of the 50s and 60s, but now I believe we find ourselves in a new era in which the

flood gates have been reopened. In 2013 the Black Lives Matter movement was founded, and

since then it has held the attention of the nation. Much like the Civil Rights Movement Black

Lives Matter has been perceived in many different ways by many different people. This should

be more than enough evidence that even though things seem to be more racially sound on the

surface level, they are truly not when you start to dig deeper. Black Lives Matter is not going

away anytime soon, mostly because of its origins. Black Lives Matter may be the first racial

movement to be born solely from social media. The movement started on multiple social media

outlets after the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was initially charged with the

second-degree murder of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old unarmed African American boy. The

amount of media attention paid to this case, and the simple fact that we are more interconnected

than ever before gave Black Lives Matter the power to quickly spread across the country,

forming many local groups that each have their own take on exactly what the organization stands

for. Being born from social media is what allowed Black Lives Matter to quickly spread, but it

has also lead to some of its problems as well. Most Americans can agree that the leader of the

Civil Rights Movement was Martin Luther King Junior, Black Lives Matter however has no

face. There is not one person the people of America can place behind the Black Lives Matter
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movement, so to the vast majority of this country it simply appears as this giant mass of anger.

Whether you believe that anger is justified or not is up to you.

In July of 2017 WDAY 6 covered the news story of a confrontation that went down in

Fargo between a Mapleton woman and three young Somali women. According to the news cast,

''A confrontation at a Fargo Wal-Mart parking lot is creating a national media frenzy after a

video of an argument went viral..."She said I am going to kill you guys," said Rowda Soyan, who

was involved in the confrontation.''(WDAY 6). This confrontation resulted in Amber Hensley

being fired from her job, and issuing an apology via Facebook to the 3 women she went off on.

''Hensley later issued a Facebook message, saying she apologized for, what she called, "horrible

things" she said. It was not a Christian like thing to do, she wrote, I lost my cool, she wrote, I am

terribly sorry...The women now say the whole incident was unfortunate, and they know Hensley

has apologized.'' This is an example of how racism can seep into people's lives who would not

normally be openly racist. Hensley apologized to these women, and they accepted her apology,

the question that needs to be asked though is why did this argument turn so quickly towards a

race issue. We've all had bad days where something happens and you yell at some random

person you've never met, but if this exact situation had played out between two Caucasian people

it probably wouldn't have. Even if these two people had been of different ethnicities or national

origins. It is incidents like this that show us that there is still a deep seeded racist attitude in

America, that while it may rarely show itself does still exist.
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Where does it come from though, is it simply a natural element to our humanity, or is it

something more. In the journal Transmitting Trauma: A systematic review of vicarious racism

and child health the authors give some incite. Vicarious racism, or secondhand racism, is a form

of racism that does not get much attention, especially when dealing with children. ''Because

children develop within the context of their families and wider social environments

(Bronfenbrenner, 1979), they may be particularly vulnerable to the adverse consequences of

vicarious racism (Dominguez et al., 2008), specifically the perceived threats or maltreatment of

persons in their environment (Cohen et al., 1995; Priest et al., 2012; Kelly et al., 2013).

Vicarious racism experiences threaten a child's sense of the world as just, fair, and safe, fostering

feelings of helplessness and despair, which may hold consequences for their mental and physical

health (Dominguez et al., 2008; McEwen, 2005; Simons et al., 2002).'' This focus of the children

applies to those who fall victim to racist attitudes. A person could never directly fall under

effects of racism, but in this modern-day society we are pelted with examples of truly horrendous

acts on a daily basis from multiple media outlets. This is exposing to more and more people to

vicarious racism, and is also why we are seeing an increase in protests and riots across the

country. As the research paper says, vicarious racism leads children to see the world as unfair,

making them feel helpless. When these children grow up, they will more than likely feel the

exact same way. However, this concept can also be applied to the people who are not being

discriminated against, but the people who initiate the discrimination in the first place.

Children mimic their parents, if their parents are in any way racist then it is safe to

assume that the children will grow up with some level of racist ideology as well. Vicarious

racism can also be seen as a part of this, as I believe it is in the present state of the U.S. Many

rural majority white communities will feel like there's a threat when they see that there is rioting
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because of a shooting, or that a police officer had been shot by a minority. There may have been

no concern in a community like this at all, but as soon as they are being bombarded by news

story after news story reporting on this they feel like the pressure is on. This is how the media is

playing a role in stimulating this massive onset of vicarious racism in America, which is already

starting to lead to more and more examples of violent direct racism. These attitudes on both sides

are then passed down from parent to child, before it will eventually reach a boiling point and

explode.

Letter: America has every right to pick and choose who can move here by Ross Nelson is a

perfect example of how racial tensions and lack of communication can quickly sour people's

attitudes. Nelson wrote this letter in response to Mike McFeely's comments on the before

mentioned incident in a Fargo Walmart parking lot. McFeely is a talk show host and columnist in

Fargo-Morehead who Ross Nelson feels is being too coddling to the new immigrants of

America. '' McFeely then, in a twisted marvel of thinking, compares the settlers under the

Homestead Act who had to "prove up" their "free" claims or lose them--and many lost them--to

modern immigrants who enjoy welfare benefits of food, housing, education, and medicine. He

goes on to mock the idea that immigrants should immediately renounce their traditions and

customs to become Americans, apparently believing that subscribing to the oath of citizenship

which states in part that they "absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and

fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which [they] have

heretofore been a subject or citizen" means they can't keep their own traditions at home. In fact,

he hardly makes a single assertion in his column that's true.'' (Nelson). I find the last line of this

quote to be very significant, as this is what Nelson says directly after. ''Being of a liberal stripe

which often means uninformed knee-jerking, McFeely also favors letting in unskilled,
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uneducated immigrants--evidently thinking that a nation can never have too many--over those

who would fit in faster, easier and bring needed talents.'' (Nelson). Nelson's letter accuses

McFeely of being an uninformed liberal who refuses to accept the facts, when in reality Nelson

does not put forth any facts to protect his own point of view. This is the true problem in America

right now concerning racism, these two men are simply calling each other names and saying that

the other person is wrong instead of sitting down and trying to establish a real line of

communication. What makes it worse is that this is what nearly every group in America is doing

right now, whether it be social, economic, political, or racial groupings.

How can it be stopped? How can we stop this endless back and forth, how can we stop the

transmitting of racial ideology from parent to child? The first step to any problem is to admit

there is one, but in order to have some real results we would have to reach out to as many people

as possible. It would be wonderfully if news agencies would stop shoving stories down the

populations throat, but that will not happen as long as they keep getting the huge ratings. I

believe the best way to alert people to this is too simply explain to them, and show them what is

happening. This could be done through an ad campaign, either on TV or social media. To simply

create a series of short videos, explaining that this issue has two sides, both of which are

somewhat justified in how they feel. These videos would have to show emphasis on what is

causing the problem of racism in America, how they may be contributing, and how what they

think they are doing to help is not helping at all. The goal of these videos would not only be to

educate, but to encourage these people to simply listen to one another. Granted this will never

happen between the more extreme members of either side, but the majority of the people

involved in all these movements are simply scared and afraid of what's happening. To open up a

line of dialogue, to be able to show each other that we are all just human, that would be the real
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goal of this video series. After all, Memmi definition of racism was a failure of relations between

people so the first logical step in getting rid of racial tensions would be too try to repair the

relations between these people.

In essence, I would want my message to be presented in a similar format to John Oliver's

show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. In particular I will be referring to the episode of the

series focused on illegal immigrants, and border control. In this episode of the series Oliver takes

some common misconceptions about illegal immigration across the southern border of the

United States, and simply debunks them using simple facts. He also makes it a point to describe

how illegal immigration in the United States is not really a problem anymore. This is also

demonstrated by the article Unauthorized immigrant population stable for half a decade by

Jeffrey Passel and D'Vera Cohn. ''An estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants lived in

the U.S. in 2014, according to a new Pew Research Center estimate based on government data.

This population has remained essentially stable since 2009 after nearly two decades of changes.

The recent overall stability contrasts with past trends. The unauthorized immigrant population

rose rapidly during the 1990s and early 2000s, from an estimated 3.5 million in 1990 to a peak of

12.2 million in 2007. It then dropped sharply during the Great Recession of 2007-09, mainly

because of a decrease in unauthorized immigrants from Mexico. The number of unauthorized

immigrants from Mexico continued to decline from 2009 to 2014, but that decrease was roughly

offset by an increase in unauthorized immigrants from other parts of the world, mainly Asia,

Central America and sub-Saharan Africa.'' (Passel and Cohn).

It is simply misconceptions that illegal immigrants are pouring into America, that African

Americans are hostile by nature, that white Americans are against minorities, that all need to be

cleared away in order to create a better tomorrow. This is how I believe my proposal would help
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to eliminate racism in the United States, if we could simply encourage people to talk to one

another, to understand what is happening, then maybe we can get things to change.
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Works Cited

Heard-Garris, N., Cale, M., Camaj, L., Hamati, M. and Dominguez, T. (2017). Transmitting
Trauma: A systematic review of vicarious racism and child health. Social Science &
Medicine. 25 Oct. 2017

Memmi, A. (2000). Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 27 Oct. 2017

Nelson, Ross. Letter: America has every right to pick and choose who can move....
Inforum.com. http://www.inforum.com/opinion/letters/4308549-letter-america-has-
every-right-pick-and-choose-who-can-move-here. 8 Oct. 2017

Oliver, John ''Border Patrol: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)'' YouTube, uploaded
by LastWeekTonight ,Aug 6 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnW5EjwtE2

Passel, Jeffrey and Cohn, D'Vera. (2017). Unauthorized immigrant population stable for half a
decade. Pew Research Center. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2016/09/21/unauthorized-immigrant-population-stable-for-half-a-decade/. 29 Oct.
2017.

WDAY. (2017). Mapleton woman fired from job after Fargo Wal-Mart confrontation....
http://www.wday.com/news/4303528-mapleton-woman-fired-job-after-fargo- wal-mart-
confrontation-sparks-social-media-storm. 20 Oct. 2017.