My First Experience With Racism

Racism is for the most part defined as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human characteristics and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority or inferiority of some particular race. It is a form of discrimination and usually carries with it an attitude of prejudice. Discrimination can be based on many characteristics: age, sex, height, weight, skin color, clothing, speech, income, education, marital status, sexual orientation, disease, disability, religion, and politics. When the basis of discrimination is someone’s perception of race, it is known as racism (Henslin 337).

When one thinks of racial tension between American Caucasians and African-Americans, the thought is generally that the Caucasian is probably the one doing the discriminating against the African-American. This is due to the fact that African-Americans were once a minority and it is an example of the “common sense” that sociologists warn us about. I can speak from personal experience as to the inaccuracy of this myth. When I was around 20 years of age I was incarcerated overnight for underage possession of alcohol. While there, I witnessed a younger white male in another cell being bullied and beaten by several African-Americans due to his race. The black guys would take his food and blankets and say things like “You don’t need these white boy. Your family has plenty of money”. They would then start laughing and eating his food items. This angered me and shamed me at the same time. I was angered because of the idea that one of “my kind” was being taken advantage of and I could do nothing about it. I was also ashamed about someone of my race not taking up for themselves. In reality, I came to discover that the boy came from a very financially challenged background and a couple of the African-Americans came from families that were upper-middle class. This is what the symbolic interactionists refer to as selective perception and it was totally inaccurate.

This event helped to crystallize a feeling of racial prejudice within me so that the actions of one group create a firm line of division between itself and another. This sociological soccer goes back and forth generating mutually exclusive character traits and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for all parties involved. So this experience definitely shaped my perceptions about life. So much so that I struggled for several years trying to gain back the ability to view people objectively.

(Henslin 337)