Melting Pot: Racism In America

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Racism in America

America, once known as the Melting Pot, welcomed immigrants with open arms. Yet today Americans are afraid of people who want to make America their home. Not only is there a fear of immigrants, many Americans suffer racial harassment. No person should ever be treated like that.
Daquan walked into the restaurant after a grueling day of work. It had been a stressful week so he decided to treat himself to a five course meal. After being seated he glanced around and noticed he had successfully beat the dinner rush. A couple of minutes later with no waiter coming to his service, he saw a nice Caucasian family walking into the restaurant. Immediately as they sat down there was a waiter at their table. He could not help …show more content…

While it’s hard to believe that this is possible, for many people in this country, personal encounters with racism are a daily reality.
Take for example Josie Ramon, a twelve year old Mexican-American student at Royal Oak Middle School, who was driven to tears by students chanting “Build that wall, Build that wall” at lunchtime the day after Donald Trump was elected according to The Detroit News. Or Maliah Gonzalez, a seventh grader at DeWitt Public Schools, who was blocked from getting to her locker by some boys chanting things about building the wall and told her “ You need to go back to Mexico.”( Lansing State Journal)
Forty-nine percent of Americans think that Racism is a big problem("Race and Reality in America: Five Key Findings." CNN. Cable News Network. Web. 17 Nov. 2016.). The more shocking part of this is that seven percent of Americans think it is not a problem at all. Although racism has improved since the early days of our country, the truth is that it still is here and healthy in …show more content…

That’s more than 3,000 racial hate crimes! Taking second place for hate crimes, it is a tie between religious hate crimes and sexual orientation hate crimes, reporting at 19%. While there are too many of these also, they don’t even come close to the number of racial oriented hate crimes. The most affected race in these crimes is blacks, with Arabs not far behind.
A reporter interviewed Chuck Taylor on this issue and this is what he had to say. “It feels like society is going back 60 years or more ago to the racism that was prevalent in the 1950’s and the 1960’s. It is a shame to give up all the progress that we made over the years in such a short amount of time. Hopefully we can change that downward trend and get rid of the division that exist today in our nation as it relates to racism.”
While not everybody holds to that point of view, there are a lot of other people holding to the same viewpoint. It is sometimes hard to change how people think. People tend to follow their leaders, sometimes subconsciously. Because of that, it’s very important our leaders set a good example for all

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