How Does Racism Affect Our Society

Racism is a very controversial, emotional topic for people to talk about that is subjective and often influenced by our social status, economic status, and where we live in the world. There is no obvious solution to this issue, nor can we change the views of the current generation, but the effects of racism will hopefully be minimized in the next generation. It all has to do with how we raise our children, since they are not born with the natural instinct to discriminate against others just because they are of a different race. People usually remember lessons they were taught in childhood and, if they learned to treat everyone the same and not take notice of skin tone, it would last with them throughout adulthood. One of the most powerful lines from Source A: Lee Daniels’ The Butler is narrated by Cecil Gaines, whom the movie follows, “America has always turned a blind eye to what we done to our own. We look out to the world and judge. We hear about the concentration camps but these camps went on for two hundred years right here in America.” Of course, these ‘concentration camps’ that he refers to represent the United States’ long history of slavery and the mistreatment of African-Americans- racism at its most extreme. While we have come a long way as a society, we still have a long way to go. In recent history, the past fifty years or so have been …show more content…
Even more interesting are the effects the author’s experiment has on his family, particularly his wife and children, especially since it was before a time when it was socially acceptable for white children to attend school with black children. They lived fairly isolated from one another, used separate restrooms, and went to different hotels, stores, restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses. John Howard Griffin believed that in order to truly understand the black perspective, he would need to become