Racing through my senior year

School is back in session!  Call me a nerd, but I love starting a new term at school, especially when it's my second to last before graduation.  This term I am taking courses on Personality, Medical Sociology, and the Surface of the Earth.  My medical sociology class this week was pretty interesting and eye opening.  For the first week, we were tasked with reading selections that identify the discrepancies in the health care system for minorities, the under educated, and low SES individuals.  From my readings, as well as life experience, it is very clear to me that racism is both alive and well.  One of my classmates, however, disagrees.

Essentially, his thoughts on the subject are rooted in unacknowledged white privilege.  He says:

The chapter also talks about how blacks tend to have more health problems then whites, inferring that the reason is racism, which i don't agree with, i think its paranoia, because racism is really more of an American issue. Racism really is not noticed in other countries, and even in Africa, white people are the minority, and yet, their life expectancy and health problems are still less. So where is the books explanation for that? I think blacks poor health compared to whites is merely a genetic factor. Blacks tend to be taller then whites, and they tend to be more physically fit. Race just seems to have different health patterns, and it has nothing to do with racism, unless they have anxiety from their paranoia.

So as a white woman who has lived in the south and witnessed racism around her her entire life, I'm just paranoid and it doesn't indeed exist?  Excuse me for just a second while I bang my motherfucking lily white head against the wall.  I grew up in the minority in my predominantly black town yet STILL witnessed racism  toward African-Americans on an almost daily basis.  Most neighborhoods in my hometown are completely segregated still.  The local private school serves merely to be a place of refuge for kids whose parents are afraid of black folk.  Many a conversation could be started with the phrase, "I'm not racist, but..."

Remember those long ago reports of some schools in the South having both a black and white prom queen?  We were one of them.  White parents would get so outraged that their children were in the minority that they forced school officials to set a policy that everything be equally racially divided.  I tried out for cheerleading in the 9th grade and made it.  Not because I was good, no.  I was an overweight brainiac just looking for something to do.  I made the squad, however, because I'm white.  I hear complaints about affirmative action and giving jobs to less qualified people because of their skin color and it always reminds me of making the cheerleading squad explicitly because there was a quota to be met of white students, so that the white kids whose parents didn't have enough money to send them to the all white school would have guaranteed spots in sports and positions of school leadership that they would otherwise most likely not have because the white people were the minority.  How is this at all any different than affirmative action programs that these same white townspeople so vehemently oppose?

See?  There I am being all cheerleader-y and stuff.

So my classmate also says that "Racism is really more of an American issue."  Really, bud?  Tell that to the millions of Jews who were killed during World War II.  Tell it to Australians who are happy to accept American foreign investments, but turn their noses up at potential Chinese and Middle East investors.  What about the Dalits in India?  Greece being touted as one of the most racist countries in the EU?

Racism is not a uniquely American cultural phenomenon, as my classmate implied.  Just as classism and sexism occur in most societies in some form, racism is everywhere.  To sit and say otherwise would make you a fucking moron.  I said it:  You are a fucking moron if you do not believe that racism exists worldwide, and in the United States in the form of discrimination against African Americans and other ethnic minorities by the majority group, institutional policies, educational systems, mortgage companies, and on and on.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, wish me luck for the upcoming term in which I try my hardest to not call someone a fucking moron while they are being a fucking moron.