More Than Just Race

I almost dreaded the idea of having to watch an almost 2 hour long video, but then i started listening to how this man talked during this speaking. The speaker made this a very comfortable environment to talk about a controversial topic, Race.

I want to start at a point close to the end where the speaker talks about a time where he talked to younger students about their views, these children may have only been about 10 years old but they had their own ideas about race. Through TV shows and the society in which they have grown up in, i thought this idea of students formulating their own ideas and maybe even bias's due to social media and society directly connected with the conversational topics that have been discussed in our classroom the last couple weeks. I found this fact very interesting that there are more people out there that find it important to look at the young minds in our society, you can really learn a lot about how the rest of society thinks about a situation or problem by talking to young kids. These children are like sponges, they pick up everything around them, for good and bad, they begin to formulate their own opinions early in life. They do this just by listening to the adults in their lives and the way they themselves views ideas and political topics such as race.

I know for a fact that there are many kids when i was growing up that "stole" their parents political and social views. I say "stole" because instead of learning about these topics and formulating their own true ideas they would say they believe it because its what their parents believe. I remember one year in school we had an election, they held fake elections for Obama or Romney, one girl asked me who i was voting for, at the time i really didn't know because i didn't really have an opinion. She told me that i had to vote for Romney because her parents make a lot of money and Obama would hurt her parents and make them pay more in taxes. More shocking is what she said after, she said her parents didn't like black people, that the president had always been white and that is how it was supposed to be. Then i really didn't understand how someone could be so mean, i had asked her what she thought  and she simply said she believed what was right... This i feel is a continuing problem, children are picking up on their parents ideals may it be social or political and applying them to their own lives, i believe that most don't see how big of an impact their opinions have on youth. We need to show people that your own opinion rather then the one you adopted growing up is most times better.

This speaker of course touched upon several other important topics such as the astonishing number of white people who say they have multiple black friends while the black population polled said they only had one white friends. These results contradicted the population variable of white to blacks in the nation greatly, so who is lying?

I still wonder to this day why Race is such a barrier in our society, we have come so far you would think but it still seems we are stuck in the age of the oppression, is this because i am white? Does the color of my skin act as a veil to the real problems? I like to think that i don't judge, but i know myself to make judgments because of the social stereotypes i have become so familiar with. Is the speaker right, is it hard for white people to recognize racism, do we only recognize the serious offenses?