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Nhi Nguyen
28 April 2014
From the Past to the Future: Racism lives on
Everyone knows New York City as the city that never sleeps, but another name that is
associated with this famous city is the melting pot. By now you would think that everyone would
be accepting of one another since they have all been through the same struggle, but it seems
racism can never be truly abolished. I remember walking around a block that is called Little
Italy with some friends. A young Italian boy skipped past my group and stared directly at me.
Ching chong maka hiya, were the exact words I heard. I have long outgrown that stereotype,
but what disgusted me the most was that slur managed to survive to the next generation and I had
to hear it from a little boy who did not know any better. Racism will continue to subsist as long
as children are continually exposed to the racial slurs and stereotypes through adult influences
and media.
People worldwide receive their knowledge on current events from the news. The news
has the power to portray their information however they want and they purposely withhold
certain facts to sway the audiences mind. When hearing something concerning politics, the
image of a white male would most likely be associated, but when the story involves murder or
rape, the race that is portrayed is either African American or Hispanic. Entertainment media adds
on to the fire through the content in their movies, television shows, and even video games.
Movies and television series drop racial slurs, using them in a comical content which warps the
consciousness of the audience to think as long as it is used for a humorous purpose, it is
acceptable. Video games do not help either by making the characters spit out racial insults left
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and right during combat or cut scenes. The main target of all of this unconscious manipulation is
the younger generation.
Stereotypes are developed through the continuous observation of human behavior. These
stereotypes continue to live because they are passed down through word of mouth. A child is not
born knowing these terms, they hear them from family members and friends and slowly it is
engraved into his/her brain. It is like an incurable disease that just cannot be stopped. When one
family member catches the virus it will continue to spread to the next relative and their children
and that will continue to pass on to the next generation. The problem is that the adults do not take
into account what their children are exposed to and what they are exposing to their own children.
When a child slips a racial slur, it is simply looked over and sometimes even laughed at.
It takes a whole new notion when an adult uses the exact same term. From the book The First R:
How Children Learn Race and Racism, sociologist Ausdale and Feagin argue that children
mature cognitively by taking in what they experience around them and morphing that knowledge
into their mental understanding of that idea. The child is considered an adult only when they
have successfully adapted those ideas into the adult world, but until then their thoughts and
perception of the world are seen as nothing more than abstract thoughts.
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Young children have
been overshadowed and almost completely ignored because they are thought to be just immature
kids. What adults do not understand is that a child grows and learns from what they see and hear
around them. A childs main source of mental development is the people who raise her/him.
When a grown adult expresses contempt towards a certain race or refers to them in a derogatory
way, people are appalled; they start questioning how that adult turned out the way they did.

1
Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism
(Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002),
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After all, such behaviors should have been corrected long ago? Ausdale and Feagin states that It
is childrens status as socially insignificant that cripples adults ability to analyze their worlds
accurately and enables them to effectively hide some significant activities from adult scrutiny.
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All children grow up to become adults and if they are constantly ignored and allowed to
carelessly absorb the racial images and words around them without guidance they will become
what they deemed was acceptable during their childhood.
Out of all the age groups that are easily persuaded, it will always be the children.
Following the death of Trayvon Martin, the media did not lose this opportunity to showcase his
face and to associate his racial status along with the trial. Philanthropist Max Fisher states in his
article, The Talk: What Parents Tell Their Children About John Derbyshire, that this case lead
black parents to have a talk with their children about what it means to be a black teenager in
America, which has a past history of viewing black descendants as a threat and they must
embody the exact opposite to counteract the stereotype.
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Although they were not directly
involved, this all leads back to the children. The news which is mainly watched by parents
influences their view point and from that, the parents will influence their own children with those
view points. Fisher talks about John Derbyshire, a journalist who wrote an article on having the
talk with his children and suggests other Caucasian and Asian parents to do the same because of
the George Zimmerman case. In the talk, he states that parents should warn their children of, the
hostility many blacks feel toward whites and to avoid concentrations of blacks not all known
to you personally, also, before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much

2
Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin, 8

3
Max Fisher, The Talk: What Parents Tell Their Children About John Derbyshire, The Atlantic,
April 8, 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/the-talk-what-parents-tell-
their-children-about-john-derbyshire/255578/

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more carefully than you would a white.
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He concludes, If you are white or Asian and have
kids, you owe it to them to give them some version of the talk. It will save them a lot of time and
trouble spent figuring things out for themselves. It may save their lives.
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Again, this shows that
media will manipulate the way a person views an issue and this all goes back to the children, the
future of our nation. As long as this trend continues along with each generation, racism will
always find a way to subsist.
Will there ever be a time when racism can ever completely cease to exist? For each
generation, our children are the hope and future of the country but we easily forget how easily
influential they are. We question how some people can even discriminate others based on their
race while the answer is right in front of us. It all starts from childhood. A person does not
automatically become a racist at the moment of their birth. They watch, they learn, they absorb
and they incorporate everything that is going on around them growing up which transforms them
into the adult they are today. When making a change in the world, the adults have to realize that
the children are where it all starts.










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Max Fisher

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Max Fisher