The word racism
has always scared me to death. Since I learnt its meaning I’ve always been able
to recognize it, unveil its true nature despite it being hidden in refined,
beautiful words. Racism sneaks into people’s statements leaving acute listeners
flabbergasted. I remember being invited to a party by one of my highly educated
friends. He started talking about one of our common friends’ skin colour and
ended out calling him “negro”. I felt the anger building up in my stomach and
told him, in front of all the other lawyers, engineers, scholars and graduates
of any kind, who were laughing at his bad joke, that he was not only offending
him, he was also offending me, being a mixed race man, and all the people of
colour in the world as he had just spoken as a racist. Suddenly they all
stopped laughing, a gloomy silence fell over the room and he pointed out that
he was not offending me, as I was like “them”, he was just making fun of our
common friend. I understood then that he didn’t have a clue of what equality
meant, of what black people had gone through, of what history should have
taught us all. I experienced racism on my own skin and got an idea of how
rooted it can be in people’s minds, thoughts, hearts, lives.
Here’s an article
written by Rebecca Carrol, a black, American journalist, writer, editor who got
tired of newsroom racism and made a drastic choice. She chose freedom.
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