Understanding Racism: Causes and Consequences

Chapter 1: What’s Racism? What is racism? Racism is when someone treats a race poorly or they hate a specific race or multiple ones. Also it is when someone of a certain race thinks that another race is below them and should not be treated fairly.

You can see racism when people are getting hurt and they are of different races. Also there is verbal racism which you can notice if people are saying mean and hurtful things to kids of different races. One example is if someone is called the N-Word.

Why does racism happen? It happens because people hate each other or think they are better than a certain race. People do it to make the people of a race they hate feel insignificant and like they do not belong there.

Say someone is in the middle of a basketball game and someone starts making racist remarks at the person. That could make them feel weak and insignificant. It would also throw them off their game which would let their team down. Or if someone made fun of a person for their race it will make them feel like they don’t belong. Then the person would go on living their life feeling minor and unimportant in any way.

A fifth effect of racism is self-harm. If someone is a victim of racism and are being told that they don’t matter and shouldn’t be on the planet it can cause the victim to do some crazy things. One of those things is self harm. They might cut their wrists o

Chapter 7: Causes of Racism What are some causes of racism? One cause is that they were raised that way. They might have just been taught that one race is better or worse than another. Another cause could be experience. Like say someone’s family is killed or they are harmed or have been a target by someone of a certain race. They could be driven into a hatred for that race, all because someone did something wrong to them.

They could also just simply be born like that. They might be born have been born hating a race. People might be born and as soon as they see a black, white, chinese, japanese, islamic, muslim, korean, etc. and just think “that person/those people, look different and act weird, they aren’t at my social