The Race Card Project
By Michele Norris
Robert McAlister,
Lexington, SC.
Grew up in segregated south in a single parent home. Always felt on the margins but later in life realized my mom was ahead of her time in accepting and seeing everyone as God’s children.
Ashley Giles,
Spokane, WA.
Anonymous,
Austin, TX.
With the onslaught of social media, people feel that that they can judge and pressure any and everyone into being afraid to say anything that might be considered different or something that someone may disagree with. Like the old saying, “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me”. Being emotionally mature means that people can listen to someone else’s words and opinions and not be offended. If you don’t like or agree what someone says just don’t listen but shaming someone into not sharing their view isn’t going to make the world a better place
Fess Makame Justice,
Oakland, CA.
This is a quote by Shakespeare who helped organize the Bible.
Kyla J.,
Scotts Valley, CA.
Everyone deserves to be tolerated, no matter your skin color, language, or family.
Emily,
Philadelphia, PA.
I am a white American. My family is here because the Turkish government was committing genocide against Anatolian Greeks in the early 1920s. My grandmother lost her family and came to NY, and when Smyrna was burned she had no home to go back to.
The confederacy does not serve my family. To the white Christians we were not white enough to be allowed to assimilate, but at some point we did. My father was born less than white, and because of cultural shifts he became a white man. I was born in 1987 and have always enjoyed the privilege of his whiteness. I actively use language and context to disallow the idea that to be American is to be a middle class white person. I will never accept my country as being primarily for whites. This country is for everyone. Lest we forget.
Chris Smith,
Submitted via Twitter: @burning_wind
@michele_norris
Brent Vuglar,
Houghton, MI.
Just like any controversial subject where people do not see eye to eye, people tend to be close-minded to others opinions. This development of tension plants a seed of anger to one another. I myself grew up in a not so very diverse suburb, and when I was younger I believed that everyone was given an equal opportunity to achieve the mythical “American Dream”. Now we are set in a place where entitlement and inheritance are placed on a higher pedestal than, hard work and respect of one another.
Rather than acknowledging race as being a bad thing and comparing differences, we need to individually go out and be accepting. The fact of the matter is there are good and bad people in every culture and community. The sad fact is we cannot change every persons opinions, but the more people that accept that EVERYONE is different and that we cannot change biology, acceptance naturally follows. It is not one voice that creates change, it is an orchestra of them.
Evan Contreras,
Puyallup, WA.
Music is powerful. Share it with everyone, and you may find more in common than you expected.
Drew Middleton,
Summerville, GA.
My six words are about people thinking that they are different but they are all basically the same in one way or another.
Lorna Dianne Stookey
Fredericktown, MO
It cut deep, the aftermath of the 2008 election. I woke up to find racism splashed across the front page: “We finally got one of OURS in the White House.” Whose “ours” was he? He’s multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multiracial! He’s European American and African American. He’s “Everyman.” Could have been the best advertisement for America — we celebrate out diversity by electing him to be the President for EVERY ONE OF US! But no. Thenceforth, he was only and always called a ‘Black’ President, because he had brown skin. And despite my vote, I felt deep loss. History will record that he was the first “Black” President and overshadow any and all he has accomplished. Are we back to the days of, “The eighth crossing clears the blood?”
I wanted to scream out, “HE’S MY PRESIDENT, TOO!” But forget it. He’s clearly been claimed by his perceived race. News flash: if approximately 20% of Americans are Black, then it also took a he!!uva lot of “us” to elect him! Why are we still “us-ing” and “them-ing?”
I got on his website and typed out my message, “If it’s still all about race, then we’re still all wrong.” But for the last four years, every argument on the internet brands the dissenters “racist.” Seriously? All his other virtues, all the things that could be said in praise of him, and he’s only as good as half his racial heritage? My heart breaks. He’s at least as great an orator as Kennedy. He’s a visionary. He has a broader perspective to bring from experiencing other countries and cultures. His first campaign was all about successfully injecting hope back into the ordinary American citizen, hope of being heard, hope of everyone being counted as worthwhile, hope of ending the pseudo-aristocracy that has been formed by rampant capitalism and lifetime politicians, and hope of working together, heedless of race, to elect this fresh new face whose words resonated in the hearts of the citizenry. Anybody thought of that stuff lately? Nope, he’s only “Black,” and disagreement is equated to being a racist. How many centuries until we get to have a real dialogue??
Or is he still only allowed to be “black?”
Ted Mittelstaedt,
Portland, OR.
I was born in 1966 and by age 13 I knew how to solder and by age 15 I was building electronic devices from schematics. By age 20 I had taken apart and put back together several different kinds of computers and written code in assembly language. I also have a complete garage and can disassemble and reassemble a car engine if need be. Today my job is the care and feeding of computer networks, I’m the guy who’s work behind the scenes allows you to even have this website.
You folks need to understand that modern high technology could not function today without the millions of words of technical data created by technicians and posted on technical forums and used by technicians. This is not the idle musings of the Facebook crowd this is the down and dirty of machine code and how it works and how hardware works. This is how techs are able to repair critical technical gear that the manufacturer may have gone into bankruptcy 10 years ago yet the gear is still in service. It is how the operating system this website runs on was written and the software that makes up the webserver was written.
And these techs are scattered all over the world, both genders, and every “race” imaginable.
High Technology is just like Low Technology, it is a tool for humans to do things. The iPhone is the same as an automobile, or a flyswatter, or a hammer or a saucepan. They are all tools. Using tools is what Humans do. And every human in the world, no matter what race, no matter whether they are a dark skinned aborigine in the Australian Outback using a stick, or a white skinned plastic surgeon in Cleveland driving a BMW, is using a tool.
My business is keeping those tools running, and fixing them when they break. And that is the business of every tech in the world. Do you really think for one second that any of us care about the race or gender or any of that nonsense of another tech who helps us do this?
When discussing things like police traffic stops of minorities people forget that those cops are dependent on the technology of their cars that was mostly made by yellow-skinned people in China. The cops who think they are “making the streets safer by scaring off those minority gangs” couldn’t do that without their tech which was created by those same minorities.
The very bullets that were used to kill minorities in some of the recent high profile crimes were made in a factory staffed with minorities.
When discussing things like population demographics in the US changing to minorities becoming the majority, people conveniently ignore that there are so many more people today, that we are now utterly dependent on high tech advanced agriculture to grow enough food to feed everybody. If your definition of “taking back America” is making America like it was 50 years ago – mostly white – then I hope you enjoy starving because if we really went back to doing things in America the way we did them 50 years ago then we wouldn’t grow enough food for the population and everyone would starve.
The reality is that this race discussion is pointless. Race only matters today to people with the luxury to pretend the world is 1000 times simpler than it really is and who have no real clue about how things really work in the world. And as proof of that this very website – which wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for the combined contributions of every race and gender working together for years – has the hubris to setup a “discussion” as though there was any choice in the matter.
Only a liberal arts graduate who probably doesn’t even know how to do her own oil changes could think up something like this site.
Alex Campbell,
Aurora, IL.
People come in many different shapes, sizes, colors, and with different histories. It is unreasonable to pack many millions of people into one single idea. Terms are made to have wide acceptance and understanding and that is fine. However, generalizations (especially race) should never go past the simple idea of convenience.
Ashlyn Herd
Denver, CO
In 2012, the top choirs at Denver School of the Arts took a trip to Boston, because we had been accepted to perform in prestigious settings such as Berkley College of Music, Boston Conservatory, New England Conservatory, and Harvard. In Bellissima (our 33 member, 9th and 10th grade all women’s choir), we were mostly composed of young women who were white. We went through airport security as a group. By the time all of us were through, my choir director had to stay back while 4 of our members were chosen for further questioning. Despite nothing suspicious having come up on the scanners for any of them, they were they only four of the young ladies who were African-American in our choir. This occurred in DIA (Denver International Airport), which depicts pictures of equality in paintings along its walls. A few years earlier, it even opened up a section specifically designed to celebrate the Native American culture. How can we say that we are a society of equality when the basic rights of African Americans are still questioned?
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