Op Ed: You Racist

It has been requested that racism on campus be exposed and confronted, which lead me to write this article. Racism is everywhere. It’s in the East; it’s in the West. It’s in small towns and big cities. It’s here at FGCU; it’s inside of everyone. I could rant about how certain individuals feel like they can’t walk around campus without feeling glares of prejudice. I could criticize people who move from one side of a hallway to another just to avoid a certain group of people. I could demonize the clear segregation that tends to happen in the dining areas. I could say that racists are a scourge upon the campus and that the school would be better off without them, but in any of these cases I would only be contributing to the problem.

From what I have seen and heard, even the victims of racism here at FGCU tend to be the people who are not actively mixing themselves with the other races, which is slightly racist in itself. Generally the people who find racism are the ones who are looking for it; do enough digging, and you will certainly find something racist. We are all racist to a certain extent. We categorize and differentiate and group and segregate from the day that we are born until the day that we die; that’s how we understand the world around us. Inevitably this is going to lead to the categorization of people based on certain attributes. The importance is in how we act on this perception.

Difference is only a bad thing because we think that it is. If there was no difference in the world, the world would probably not even exist. Progress would surely slow to a snail’s pace. Every level of existence depends on difference, not sameness, to function. This includes social institutions. What would laborers do without an engineer to plan and design for them? What would an engineer do without laborers to execute his plans? What would the sick do without a physician? How would a physician become adept without the sick? My point is that we are interdependent, connected through a web of strengths and weaknesses that balance and enhance one another.

Racism is just a failure to recognize this; I consider racism to be a disability. Racism ignorantly connects skin color with value. “Black” people can have different qualities just like “white” people and “brown” people. Oprah and Kanye West are fairly different people, Stephen Hawking and Paris Hilton too. We all have niches, and skin color rarely has anything to do with filling them.
Racists are basically attention-deprived hate mongers; they thrive on the thrill of being in the center of attention and stirring things up. They like to evoke hate and unrest, and when people get uppity about racism and try to start a witch hunt, it’s almost like the racist’s dream-come-true, even if they are the target of the witch hunt. For a racist the worst thing that could happen is for people to stop paying attention to them, giving them what they claim to want: a “pure” or “clean” homogenous society. A “clean” society would likely just create a new “impurity” to purge.

By giving racists the hate that they crave, we also inhibit our own cause. Why fight hate with more hate? Hating racists because they hate other people is like punching a brick wall because it won’t move. In the end you will exhaust and destroy yourself, while the brick wall will remain unaffected. The better method is to just move around the brick wall. Let it stand there forever for all we care; we are moving forward and progressing. If the brick wall desires solitude so much, then that’s what it will have once we have moved over the horizon. But we will never make it over the horizon by punching brick walls. We have to hold ourselves responsible for change, not others; one finger pointed at the other is three fingers pointed at the self.