My parents lived in a time where racism was seen as “normal”. Their parents said the N word and their peers were racist. My parents lived through something they never wanted me to be a part of, so they tried to hide it from me. Discrimination, poverty, and conflict were foreign ideas. But eventually, the world showed its ugly head and I learned about a dark side I intended to unmask. After so long, I developed my own mind and started seeing the world in different ways than my parents. But that doesn’t mean the world is any different. Just because slavery is abolished and laws are enacted, doesn’t mean racism is over and it doesn’t happen on a daily basis. Racism is a subtle, cultural norm that has been ingrained in our heads for years, and
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I started to call out my parents, most often my father, on their racism by the time I was 17. It took a while, but my parents realized that I wasn’t going to be the kind of person that judges because a skin color. Years prior, the one thing that changed my entire perspective on race, and was probably the trigger for my strong feelings towards racism now, was a movie. Since my parents are big movie buffs and realized I was old enough at the time, they showed me A Time To Kill, which is still one of my all-time favorite films. In this movie, a young black girl is raped, beaten, urinated on, almost hanged and thrown off a bridge by two bigoted, older white men. These two men eventually face a trial, where they most likely won’t be convicted due to most of the town being racist. As they make their way to the trial, the girl’s father opens fire and kills them, now to face his own trial. He calls upon an inexperienced white lawyer to take his case. This lawyer, who is friends with the father, faces hardship knowing that it will be tough to convince a jury of his innocence, solely because he is black. As the trial continues, the city’s Ku Klux Klan chapter commits heinous crimes that include burning crosses and blowing up houses toward the lawyer’s family and his team in order to get the message of “traitors”
I started to call out my parents, most often my father, on their racism by the time I was 17. It took a while, but my parents realized that I wasn’t going to be the kind of person that judges because a skin color. Years prior, the one thing that changed my entire perspective on race, and was probably the trigger for my strong feelings towards racism now, was a movie. Since my parents are big movie buffs and realized I was old enough at the time, they showed me A Time To Kill, which is still one of my all-time favorite films. In this movie, a young black girl is raped, beaten, urinated on, almost hanged and thrown off a bridge by two bigoted, older white men. These two men eventually face a trial, where they most likely won’t be convicted due to most of the town being racist. As they make their way to the trial, the girl’s father opens fire and kills them, now to face his own trial. He calls upon an inexperienced white lawyer to take his case. This lawyer, who is friends with the father, faces hardship knowing that it will be tough to convince a jury of his innocence, solely because he is black. As the trial continues, the city’s Ku Klux Klan chapter commits heinous crimes that include burning crosses and blowing up houses toward the lawyer’s family and his team in order to get the message of “traitors”