Racism Must Stop

Racism Must Stop

Courage under fire. The ability to stand up for your beliefs in the face of adversity. Having the wherewithal to succeed where others have failed. All very noble ideas and every human being on this planet should strive towards making these statements a reality. In a kinder, gentler world, everyone would succeed in whatever they wished to accomplish. But the world can be very cold and unforgiving. There has to be a problem when having a different skin color is all it takes to enrage somebody and cause detrimental and often times violent outcomes.

I had a friend, nameless in this story due to pending court proceedings, who grew up in a bad neighborhood. He was a straight-A student, a generous person, and a very dear friend. One evening, after coming home from internship, my friend gets off the bus and begins to walk the five blocks to his house. According to eyewitness accounts, a six-year-old African-American boy was run over by a drunk driver, consequentially another African-American. The only two witnesses were an eighty-three-year-old woman suffering from Parkinson's disease and a wheel chair bound Vietnam veteran, both unable to do anything but call the cops. When my friend saw the boy lying in the street, he went to the boy and attempted to help him. It was the last decent act my friend ever had the chance to do.

After checking the boy out and not finding a pulse, my friend began to run down the street towards a payphone to call for help. A group of seven African-Americans, both males and females, allegedly saw my friend just as he was running away from the little boy. They chased my friend down before he could get to a phone and beat him senseless; thinking it was him that hurt the...

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Racism is wrong and hating people for the color of their skin is wrong. My friend lived most of his life being called "whitey" and being excluded from the people in his neighborhood, simply because he wasn't the same as the majority. These things shouldn't matter but they obviously do. The sacrifices my friend made cost him his life, but by convincing his parents to donate his organs, I helped save a little boy and several other fellow human beings.

Above all else, I feel no hate or resentment towards any particular group of people, not even the ones that took the loving, caring person my friend was away from us. I feel genuine pity for them or any other racists. To live in our modern world and exclude or hate other people for such inconsequential idiosyncrasies is both archaic and monotonous. To hate someone is to hate yourself. Enough is enough.