I’ve never fully grasped the concept of racism as a structural and institutional construct until the middle of my junior year of high school. Instead, I was under the assumption that racism only meant being offensive to another person or causing harm to their emotional state because of the color of their skin. Of course, I’ve always known it was something unethical, but it was never thoroughly explained to me or extensively discussed about in school. In my ignorance, racism was the distant relative whom family members rarely mentioned because of the shame and disgrace it brought to the family name. My first encounter with overt racism was in a nail salon, when a middle-aged white woman publically made an islamophobic remark.
I uncomfortably
I uncomfortably