No "w'z" Allowed

After reading the first few paragraphs of Sports Taboo, I thought oh no, another Black Bart essay! How confusing! But after reading more and more of the essay, I was able to find one point I think Malcolm Gladwell made very clear, and that was "black" people are more physically fit for sports than "white" people are. Hopefully that is one idea we were suppose to take from that.

I could also relate to censoring myself. I especially like when she said, "this country does not have a history of showing tolerance toward any racial minority whose members are easy to pick out of a crowd." I don't know why I like this quote so much, I guess it is because she put America on "blast" yet in a classy way. She even gave proof of this by giving us an example of Japanese Americans and Pearl Harbor, which I feel was a very clever way of proving her point and making it a fact, and not just her opinion. But her piece also made me feel guilty for how much I stereotyped all Arabic looking people after 9/11. I remember not wanting to get on subways, or buses, or planes, if I saw an Arabic person was getting on, in fear that it might blow up, and I truly regret it.


But the piece that really kept my attention was the essay entitled Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, by Beverly Daniel Tatum. In this essay, Ms. Tatum, in my opinion, very vividly explains the stages which lead to the segregation that is seen throughout many middle schools and high schools, no matter where one might happen to look. First, she says, that we began to learn the meaning of racial identity. Becoming more involved with the world outside, and interacting with the world around us, as we approach teenage years, African American children began to absorb the belief and values of the dominant white culture. That's including the idea that its better to be white. Then, she says, we have an encounter, which is our first hand experience of discrimination and/or racism, and this is when I realized that maybe Ms. Tatum really had a valid point with her ideology.

I remember the very first time I came face to face with discrimination at the age of 7. I was in Macy’s, and I can’t remember exactly what I was doing, but I remember that I bumped into a Caucasian boy around my age by accident. Really, it was by accident, but he ran to his mom, who was close by and told her, that I pushed him, as if on purpose. And I remember her saying “don’t stoop to her level; people like her don’t have any home training!”

I didn’t quite understand what that meant at the time, so I didn’t you know run back to my mom about what the women had said, but I remember feeling low, and worthless. But after knowing what I do now, and having this essay bring the memory back, I now see the reason for my feeling of worthlessness. And although not quite the same story, of the white friend who couldn’t relate to her black friend’s story, I remember that I did not want to be around anybody who looked like the boy or his mother who gave me that “low” feeling, so I stayed around people who looked like me. So could this really be true. Are we setting ourselves back to the days of segregation by willingly segregating ourselves because we don’t want to have to face our reality? I can agree with Ms. Tatum on that, but how can we cope, yet at the same time not hurt ourselves by steering clear of the separation that “they” want all along?