Let’s Switch the Code

In a nation where the air we breathe is polluted with the ideologies of Whiteness, People of Color are faced with two options: choke on the smog or put on a mask. While it would be ideal for one not to choke on smog, there’s two reasons why a POC wouldn’t wear it. One would be that no matter how hard they try, they just cannot find a mask that’s capable of blocking out this smog. The other reason for …

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Describe Who?

If someone were to describe you, what are the first things they would say? How would someone describe me: a white, blonde, young woman. See, that wasn’t too hard to describe myself with the acknowledgement of my race. Now if I can use race to describe myself, then why is it so hard to acknowledge another person’s race when describing them? I ask this question with the knowledge that for most of my life, race has been the last characteristic …

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Let’s talk about racism! Sure…But when?

My first American history lesson started with the Crash Course series on YouTube in the summer of 2017, about two months before I came to the States. My “teacher” was a white woman from Texas whose name I failed to remember, who seemed nice and honestly was the spitting image of white Americans in media products I had consumed. She taught me everything from “checks and balances,” “electoral college,” and the Constitution to using “bathroom” or “restroom” instead of “toilet” …

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Is the Internet Racist?

When I first read this title I would think: “Yes! people on the internet are racist”. Or it may make you think “yes, I saw news articles that favor implicit racism or white supremacy.” With the access to the internet available for most people in Western society, it is almost obvious that part of the internet shares racist and white supremacist ideologies. But I am questioning if search engines themselves are racist. The algorithms of search engines favor making the …

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Hold Your Applause

White people don’t deserve to be congratulated for doing the bare minimum. When a white person aims to be anti-racist the first thing they do is expect those of minority groups to hold their hand while they mess up. They are not your parent, your therapist, or your teacher. The checking-in glance to people of color when you want to make sure you said the right thing, the anxiety of not being “politically correct” is not for Black and Brown …

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Stop pretending we’re all the same

Watching a roleplay with my classmates, I couldn’t help but notice my peers’ difficulty in describing the interaction occurring on screen. The roleplay was a business scene, wherein an employee and HR representative were discussing the employee’s career advancement opportunities. We were given a very brief introduction to the scenario, and nobody seemed sure what was happening in the beginning, so when we were asked for analysis of the interaction students struggled to identify who was saying what, in part …

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Why is it all black and white?

Have you ever heard the sayings “black as night”, “pitch black”, “black out”, “black magic”, etc..? What do these all have in common? At first glance you can see that they all have the word black in them. However, if you look at the phrase as a whole, it is clear the word Black is used to depict darkness, whether that be literally or figuratively. Dark is the opposite of light, usually representing good. Let that sink in for a …

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