Brown vs Board of Education

Extended Comments

This week I decided to my blog based off Caitlyn's blog. While looking over the website and watching the videos, I noticed my thoughts were very similar to Caitlyn’s.

She started off by quoting the author Tim Wise, "The standard that I use, ultimately, if you want to know if a problem is still a problem it probably makes sense to talk to the ones who are the target of it, not the ones who don’t have to know because we are not………. I can be a good person, a decent person and remain oblivious and I think that is where white folks have been for a long time.”

Caitlyn points out that she didn’t agree with many things that Wise said but she agreed with this. She says, “I thought that he did not give enough credit to how much progress has been made towards racism and having equality in this country throughout the many years, but when he said this quote I realized that maybe he is noticing things that I don't.”

-Personally I feel like this country has come very far with racism. America used to be very segregated, but we have been slowly making steps in the right direction. Some of the many examples would be; the Emancipation Proclamation, the civil war, the fourteenth amendment, and a person of color is our current president. These things didn’t happen overnight, it took America a very long time to be like it is today. Also, I don’t see a lot of racism, I guess that’s my part of my “white privilege”.  Now from these videos and our discussions in class, I am aware that racism exists. I feel very positive that America will slowly keep making steps in the right direction.

Caitlyn also points out how the author used the words “black and brown folk”. She says, “It is comments like that which aren't helping us get any closer to eliminating racism and discrimination because everyone is from a different culture, I thought we were past just calling people things by the color that their skin is.” I completely agree with her. I don’t understand why some people feel so important to point out the color of someone’s skin when they aren’t white. I’ve noticed that when someone talks about a person with white skin, the color of his or her skin isn’t mentioned in conversation. On the other hand when they talk about a person whose skin isn’t white, their skin color usually mentioned. I feel like skin color should be irrelevant.

Lastly, Caitlyn had a really nice video on her bog. The video was about trying to get school to be less segregated. The video was very interesting because it gave the children’s perspective. The students had no problem with skin color. The video gives hope and is another piece of evidence that shows America is a few steps closer to being a post racial place.