Hate kills! the consequences of bigotry

The american slave trade

From 1500 to 1850, a period of 350 years, between ten and fifteen million Africans were landed in chains in the New World, and four to six million more are thought to have died during their capture or the Atlantic crossing—a total of between 14 and 21 million people. Some scholars think the Slave Trade may have cost as many as 200 million lives and there are many scholars today in both the United States, South America, the Caribbean, and East Africa who are attempting to unearth centuries old data concerning the slave trade. Whatever they find, it is all too clear that the consequences of racism is death! (External Link) (External Link) (External Link) (External Link) (External Link)&hl=en&rlz=1T4GZEU_enUS330&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=F5R0S6iWHoSMnQeH4ayvCQ&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=11&ved=0CCkQ5wIwCg

Genocidal monsters and their crimes 84http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html. power, samantha. “a problem from hell”: america and the age of genocide. perennial, new york: 2003. isbn: 0-06-054164-4.

However, acts of monstrous evil are sometimes offset by a few of the heroic human beings who resisted and stood up to evil in their own lands in their own times—people who had the courage to speak truth to power! Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent civil disobedience against the British Raj in India fueled the fires of human rights campaigns across the world. More than fifty years after his assassination, Gandhi is still revered for his intellectual strength, moral courage, and indomitable will. From Oskar Schindler’s heroic attempt to save Jews from the death camps, Steven Spielberg made the award winning film, Schindler’s List . When the Nazis decreed that all Swedish Jews were to wear yellow stars on their clothes, King Gustav V of Sweden, the next day, appeared in full dress regalia, mounted on a horse and riding through the streets of the capital with a yellow star on his uniform. Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers Union in order to address the egregious exploitation of migrant laborers. Bishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, spent much of his life in segregated South Africa calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid system. Nelson Mandela, the South African anti-Apartheid activist became the first black to be freely elected to the Presidency in the country where he had spent most of his adult life as a political prisoner on Robbyn Island. The courageous Rosa Parks was not solely responsible for the Civil Rights Movement, but she was the catalyst for the events that followed her 1953 refusal to “move to the back of the bus.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the best known leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement because of his non-violent civil disobedience, gave a famous speech in Washington, D.C. in which he said “I have a dream . . . that someday, my little children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.” Perhaps the courage of these people and others like them will give us all the bravery needed to stop such horrors from happening again in this, our world. (External Link)

Minority-majority country

By 2050, the United States will be a Minority-Majority country—California is already a minority-majority state, and Houston is a minority-majority city which means that there are numerically more minority group members than dominant group members. Since Hispanics are the fastest growing minority group in the U.S., who will have the POWER (political, social, economic) when there are numerically more minorities than whites? Why? What is the basis of POWER?

Conclusion

Regardless of the theories, minorities in America do less well by any statistical measure than the dominant group. (See: The Statistical Abstract of the United States: Income, Expenditures, Poverty,&Wealth: Income and Poverty--State and Local Data ; The Statistical Abstract of the United States—Labor Force, Employment, and Earrnings . The Statistical Abstract of the United States—Law Enforcement, Courts, and Prisons .) It is not enough to be reminded of the oppression, the inequality, indeed the hatred that has been heaped on minorities since the dawn of American history. Rather, it is for us, as individuals, day-by-day to stop the racism, sexism, and ageism by refusing to be a party to it. Perhaps if we analyze our stereotypes, our ideas of the essential characteristics of a group other than our own, then we can discover that our prejudices and pre-conceived ideas are inaccurate.

During the summer semester of 2001, a student in my Minorities class at the University of Houston-Clear Lake decided to conduct a study based on her stereotypes. She was a server in a restaurant, and had been in that job for several years. She and her fellow servers were of the opinion that African Americans did not tip well. Using this stereotype, she conducted a semi-scientific study with the help of her co-workers. To her amazement, she found that whites (after adjusting for raw numbers) were the worst tippers, and that the level of service determined how well African Americans tipped. In other words, she tested her theory (her stereotype) and found it to have no basis in fact. She told me that she had always thought of herself as a non-racist person, and was truly shocked to learn that she had been carrying some level of racism in her mind and heart for years.

Testing our beliefs may be painful, but the tests may show us the error of what we have learned. To rid the world of prejudice and discrimination toward minorities we must begin in our own hearts and minds, and in our behaviors. Perhaps if we refuse to listen to the jokes, refuse to accept negative comments, reject the stereotypes that daily bombard us in the media and in society in general, others will begin to question their own behavior and perhaps make changes that will eventually ripple throughout all of America. In other words, “let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me!”