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Racism In Schools Essay

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Children start learning about racism from a young age; they won’t fully understand what it means until later on in life. Racism, by definition, is power that operates through overt or covert policies that favor white people and are biased against people of color. It’s difficult to give a 9 or 10 year old all of the explicit facts about racism that occurred in our country’s history. By not telling them all of the facts, they are lead to believe that America is “good” in a sense, yet there is nothing good about dehumanizing a specific group of people, which is why the hard facts must be taught in our education systems. Learning about racism will help children, who will be our future, learn that they cannot relive the same mistakes that were made …show more content…

People tend to make jokes, slurs, and stereotypes about other races. Members of a specific race will hear the same negative comments so often that they’ll eventually start to believe them. According to Claude M. Steele, “...a person’s personal performance can be detrimentally affected by the psychological triggering of negative stereotypes assigned to one’s social group identity” (606). These comments will start to take an emotional toll on one’s brain and will cause a person to use the negative comments that hurt them towards people who are of the same race. It’s an endless cycle of being dehumanized, accepting the dehumanization, and then dehumanizing someone. It’s important that children know that this type of behavior was occurring in America and although Americans cannot right all their wrongs, they can still learn from their mistakes. To add on, people are aware that using slurs and stereotypes to create others feel inferior is wrong, but that does not stop them. The authors say that, “Majority of people will use racial commentary to deny equality in the safety of their own home with friends and close acquaintances” (605). The same people will embrace equality in public in order to make themselves feel better about what they say in private. Children need to learn that the only way to achieve equality is to be striving for it

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