by Max Benson

Created on: December 21, 2008

I'm not going to sit here and be blind to the racism in this country, but even if no one is ready to admit it racial discrimination in America is deteriorating. With more and more interracial couples, and more and more interracial neighborhoods America is being forced to integrate with other Americans whether they like it or not. Even predominately black neighborhoods, or predominately white neighborhoods are becoming less segregated as time goes by. This is exactly how our founding fathers vision of America looked, people from different backgrounds, different lifestyles, different history, all coming together in the number one nation on the earth. Nobody said that this goal would come easy, this goal is far from being accomplished but no one can deny the progress that has been made since 1776, nobody can deny the progress we've made from the 1980's.

White Americans do have a severe amount of world history to own up to. Maybe not today, maybe not this past week, maybe not in your life time, but at one point or another someone from the same "white" descent as you did something heinous to someone purely because they were of different religion or skin color. This so called racial discrimination of today, is a way of mending the gap. Just because the slaves were freed after the Civil War did not mean everyone in the south joined hands black and white and made amends. Hundreds of years of torture and violence are not easily forgiven.

Think of it this way, if someone told you to shake their hand and they had a rudementary hand buzzer that shocks you when they shook your hand, you'd be upset by it. If the same person told you that he promised he didn't have a hand buzzer and just wanted to shake your hand would you let him? Would you shake his hand without the slightest bit of hesitation? Wouldn't you be skeptical that he was trying to trick you again? This is not the same story of hundreds of years of enslavement, but the whole fear of people who have harmed you in the past still applies.

Old people have every right to cling to their suspicions, they could have family that were lynched when they were young, or even if their not that old they were certainly told from their parents all the harsh realities that the white man did to them. It would be natural after growing up that way that they would not so easily accept white people, even if the white family next door didn't do anything to them personally, the past is not so easily forgotten. The cycle continues when a child goes and visits his grandparents and the grandparents tell horrific stories about their ancestors and that child grows up just as spiteful and hateful as the grandparent.

But I have faith that this cycle will come to an end. More and more younger generations are not forgetting the stories of their ancestors, but remembering them for what they are: history. With more young people forced to accept one another in schools, in neighborhoods, and just in everyday life in this mixing bowl we call a country will cease the discrimination.

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