"I'm Not Racist"

The idea that struck me the hardest while listening to “The Problem We All Live Through” was the fact that although the white parents of the Francis Howell students claim they aren’t racist and their concerns about their children’s education have nothing to do with racial prejudice, they fail to understand the perspective of the black students. I’ll admit that empathizing and truly understanding other people’s situations is difficult, but to completely disregard the livelihood of the black students simply because the parents have believed this unsupported claim that integrating school districts will result in poorer education is preposterous. Many of the parents that stepped up proposed the notion that they were concerned for the safety of all the children because the black students from Normandy may not be healthy, smart enough, or too violent to work alongside their primarily white children. Some of the mothers were even scared their students would have to go through “metal detectors” when going to school, but all of these fears were all based on bits and pieces of unsupported information and preconceived notions about people of color.

This all speaks to a bigger problem in America. On the surface, everyone feels they understand what racism and segregation and inequality are and most people feel these problems should be fixed, but what many fail to understand is that they are contributing to these problems as well. As pointed out in the podcast, although laws like those from Brown versus Board of Education or policies like desegregation programs have been put in place for years, real change cannot be done until people of different backgrounds put aside their prejudices for each other and break social norms, to build a better future for people of all races. Breaking social norms and the actions of the individual can be more powerful than any law or action enforced by the government.