Deborah Sanders
New York, NY

Racism has become so deeply ingrained in our culture that we are often only able to recognize the most obvious aggressions. Even when we do recognize it, we often feel helpless to resist its powerful grip on our psyche. I think that much of the obstacles to achieving a post-racial society is the constant reinforcement of the ‘what is beautiful is good, what is beautiful is white paradigm’ being relentlessly forwarded by cultural gatekeepers such as the advertising industry and the entertainment industry.

This gatekeeper sector of society which chooses who goes on the covers of magazines, who gets the leading movie role as a symbol of beauty and who gets labeled sexy and so forth, has an overbearing and pervasive influence on the way we judge a person’s worth. According to them and the messages they espouse, first and foremost, a person and especially a woman must be beautiful to be worthy. Second, they narrowly define beauty in a way that excludes the natural features of black people. What follows, is an entire race of the people assumed to be bad by everyone, often including many of them, themselves.

I believe that the cultural gatekeepers violate the civil rights of a large segment of society by its damaging use of idealized images of beauty that influence how people value others. It impacts our ability to earn a living, to mate, attract friends and studies show that it even impacts the way teachers react to our children. When we as a society are bold enough to enforce civil rights laws and stop cultural gatekeepers from defining beauty, we will go along way towards eradicating racism.