Racial Bias

Today as we were walking down the street, I saw a dark-skinned man and started to wonder aloud about his race. My friend, who heard me, asked why it was that it mattered. My reply was just that I was curious, but there’s so much more to it. I wondered because I was wanted to know whether he was Indian or whether he was a man of African descent. I wondered, because my whole life I have been told to be wary of the black man- by the news, by the books I read, by the media I consume. It’s so ingrained in my mind, that I didn’t even realize it was a thing I did. Whenever I see a black man, I automatically get more cautious. And it’s not just something I do around black people. I see a white man in a pick-up truck and I worry that he’ll be another racist who might scream at me for being a brown person and tell me to go back to my country. I see a man who looks Muslim, and thanks to the news, I am wary of them (which is ironic given that I grew up in a Muslim majority country where everyone I knew was nothing but loving and peaceful!)

What I don’t realize is that I am racist in doing this. Every day I fear that my brother or my boyfriend or my father might be mistaken as a threat to the existence of someone else and might get hurt because of it. This fear came from one attack that happened on Indian man, which ended up in the loss of an innocent life and the pain of another. An entire community felt that fear and pain, just because they were mistaken for another.

We think “Oh, we’re not race X, we can’t be hurt”, but the truth is that everyone gets hurt by the hatred we develop due to these racial biases. We created these divides to conquer, but in today’s world, do we really need to conquer? We are humans. We explore things together, we are one species. Yet we compete. We start competing when we are children, we are told that it’s a survival of the fittest. The meaning of fittest has changed, but the competition has not. Wars have been started due to differences in the color of skin, communities have been enslaved, mistreated and even killed due to these petty things.

Maybe it is time we see that everything we are isn’t just the color of our skin, the words made by our tongue or even the gods we pray to. It’s time we realize that maybe, just maybe, we are all the same inside. Love is what we need in today’s world. Not hate! Love that can show everyone that we are the same, despite our differences. That, it is our differences that should unite us, encourage us to learn about each other. It shouldn’t be about dominating the other! That is messed up.

The change starts from me. From you. From us. I am going to make an active effort to stop doing what I’ve been programmed to do. I am a cautious person, and that might not change, but I probably will try to make myself see things from another’s view. I know that I am but a speck of dirt in this massive universe, but even the smallest electron can make something positive or negative. *Cue Carl Sagan’s Pale blue dot.*