Christopher Stuart Taylor Speech Analysis

Speaker, Christopher Stuart Taylor from Ontario is a Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General. His presentation mostly consisted of Anti Black racism and what his job does to solve black racism around the world. Part of his job as a speaker consists of addressing the failures of anti black racism and to provide solutions for institutions. He mentions that Diversity is “about the individual and about the variety of unique dimensions, qualities and characteristics that we all possess.” He also states that part of the issue in todays society is that most people see diversity as race, religion and gender, which only cover the visual differences among people. Once people realize that it is more than just …show more content…
When I think of the word “Racist”, I think of negative connotations, like most people do. I think that the speaker did not do a good job at communicating through his audience in a matter that showed he truly cared about the subject at hand. Given that the topic was on Diversity and Inclusion, I would have thought maybe his organization would provide all types of Anti racism not just for African Americans. I felt as though his bias, given his ethnicity showed throughout his tone of voice, as well as how he avoided certain questions during the question time after his presentation so that part threw me off a little bit. Besides that though, I did like how he showed the vertical silo in the powerpoint. The silo showed all different minorities, in ranking of equality and how much valuable resources they receive from society. It really made me realize how much white privilege truly exists. Personally, I felt almost guilty throughout the speech. I feel as though I am not a racist person whatsoever, but sometimes, innately I feel as if I can be somewhat prejudice. Not in the way that our textbook defines, but for example, last year, I was walking the streets of Milwaukee alone, near my hometown and a black man was walking towards me. Immediately, I felt frightened and my body went tense. I am not a racist person, and I do not have anything against any minority group. But for some innate reason, I think society, throughout …show more content…
For example, the speaker brings up slavery as the main root of racism. He mentions the commodification of human beings during the African slave trade and how people justified slavery with the inferiorities aspect. Slaves were treated like property. In the our class textbook, it mentions that blacks choices were completely dictated by white ethnocentrism. Under other terms, but still mentioned was the Zong Massacre of 1981 which consisted of the slave ship travelling to Hispaniola, but due to lack of wind, power and speed, the ship got off course. The crew decided to save the more “valuable” resources like water and food and dumped the slaves over board to die. This major event was also discussed in our class discussion which provided clear evidence that it had a huge impact on the slavery movement as a whole. The only somewhat contradicting aspect of the presentation was the absence of the indigenous people on the vertical silo. Given what we had discussed in class about the Indian tribes, I did not think they ranked below blacks as far as the amount of resources received by society. Also, the solutions that Dr. Taylor mentioned included that we as a society need to realize that racism exists before we can solve it. This realization was mentioned in the textbook as well as in class discussion. Most people are oblivious to racism, given