Will discrimination and bias ever stop?
It’s often so ingrained — and feels normal — we just shrug off our shoulders and move on.
Every life matters. No matter what color your skin is or where you come from. Every dream matters. Each one of us have hope and many would be required to work harder than others to contribute to the world.
But as a person of color and born from a poor family who cannot afford to go to an ivy league school and get a masteral degree and struggle to feed a family in-between while carving that dream with hard work, honestly, it’s twice harder.
I get it. I see it. I feel it. I’ve been through it so many times, why bother to talk about it. But as I listened to George Clooney’s interview by David Letterman about his trip in Darfur and subsequent advocacy around it, I realized, yeah, why not. Why not do the right thing and say it?
You are made to feel, despite what you have proven, that you are not good enough but you see others who just breeze through and wonder how easy it was for them. No bitterness there, it’s what you see around, a matter of fact but hard to put in words. You feel that, isn’t it?
So, basically, it’s there lurking. It’s in your travels, in the schools, even in churches. It’s in a job application or promotion or in many life opportunities. It’s how people look at you as you speak with an accent. Of course not all the time but it’s there.
As we look at what is going on in the world, and as we raise our support and outcry to end bias, racism, discrimination and violence, let us also look at ourselves and our own ingrained biases.
You can support or dash down someone’s dream with them.
We can truly help change the world one step at a time if we listen, we look at ourselves and be honest with our introspection. We’re part of the solution.
It’s not too late, together We can make the world better than this.
This picture of a boat in Morocco, for me, symbolizes people’s capacity to row and make it to that goal. But we have to row together to get to the destination, right?
