Avery,
Los Angeles, CA.
All throughout my life I’ve felt many challenges that come along with my race. All throughout elementary school, when I was an impressionable little kid, in all my history classes I was told that white people did all the harm in the world and were literally heartless. I even got bullied for my skin color in middle school. I’d get things thrown at my head, told that I’m a white devil that deserves death, and the teachers would just sit by, not doing anything. It led to me having a lot of shame for just being born in my own skin as a kid, I even used to tell strangers that I was Mexican, not white, because I could tan so well that I could pass. These days race tensions are even higher, and though I’ve been able to convince myself that I am not wrong because of my skin color, I worry for other little kids out there that are going to have to take the same journey as me and might not even come out of it. The worst part is that society has no sympathy for these kids, as they never had any sympathy for me. If I replaced every “white” in what I just wrote to “black” everyone would be up in arms, but I’m told this is apparently a false equivalency because of systemic oppression, which I can agree with to some extent. However we are still creating and trying to even further a society that puts people down for something they have no control over, and our next generations will believe there is something wrong with them just because of how they were born. Is this really a society we are okay with?
