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Olivia's picture

Babies and Racism

In the class, when Americans were having a heated discussion on race issues, I was wandering why China doesn’t have the race problem. Why don’t Chinese have those kinds of discussions? Race seems never raising our concerns. The answer may be Chinese are of the same race. But we do have white and black people. In my high school, we have five American students. We all showed great interests in them. We felt curious. That’s it. No racial issues arose. I guess maybe because the number of them is too small. If we had 300 white or black people in our school, then race would be a problem. Therefore, I guess racial issues can’t exist when there are not enough different people to make it a problem. It can also apply to two different groups of the same race or of multi races, such as our ESEM groups. If only one or two students from the other class come to our class, we will just be curious about them, showing great interests towards them. But if the whole group comes, we both get defensive. Similarly, if only one A color person come into a group of B color people, the B color people will just be curious and show strong interests. But if a group of A color people join a group of B color people, both groups will be defensive, and there arises the racial issues. Therefore, a baby staring longer at a person that has different color from him/her tells us nothing about whether babies are racists or not. Or even racism is just one defensive feeling towards color difference.  And humans have defensive feelings towards all kinds of differences.

 

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