Editor,
I am writing in hopes of pointing out the deeper problems of racism. The most common views center around the idea that the existence of racism is solely an ignorant hate of another based on skin color of a person due to his or her makeup.
The resulting connection is that skin color is nothing more than skin color and every person is as equal as the next, thus ignoring the cultural backgrounds, religions and ways of life a person may have in conflict with another. This is a very shallow response to a complex problem rooted in the major differences between races. These differences are not often understood, and thus feared and hated.
Imagining that every person was identical, the only exception being skin color, there would in actuality be no differences between these hypothetical people, and in this circumstance the logical explanation of racism would indeed be utter ignorance.
This is not the case or the cause of racism and, as a Hispanic minority, I find this reasoning to be degrading to the differences my own culture has that naturally oppose other cultural backgrounds and their implications. When someone tells me that this or that person is the same as me and that we should each be treated exactly the same, my impression is that they are telling me that our personal contexts have no meaning. I think that person assumes the problems we individually face can all be addressed in the same manner and by the same institutions.
Why do we, as individual races, need to create organizations such as El Centro de la Raza or even culture itself if we are all identical and can all go about things the same way. I am not arguing that we do not deserve to be treated the same. Rather, I am trying to express my feelings surrounding the implications of thinking on such a level of equality and the problems associated with it in the desire to point out the deeper social causes of racism.
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When looking at the ever-existent issue of racism without a consciousness of the factual social differences between races and individuals contained in them, we tend to ignore the differences of cultural interaction within the social sphere. Merely declaring equality where vast diversity exists can never solve the hierarchy of problems regarding racism. Remembering diversity and solving the threats it implies are the only courses of action that are suitable tools for fighting racism.
Paul Sedillos
Undergraduate student
