They say the south is devoured with racism and people still believe the North is heaven for Ethnic Peoples. But the fool who states this lie has never felt the wrath of the Isolated North. I’ll refrain from using specific town names for the townspeople’s own safety, but my own experience took place in a small town in New Hampshire. The town itself was strikingly beautiful, we could smell the salty air from our house, a short ride down the road and we could see one of God’s greatest creations, the good old ocean. In New Hampshire, the ocean is so short, that it’s possible to see where it starts to where it ends on a sunny day. But this is still over twenty miles. I learned to never judge a book by it’s cover after living here. My brother and I started school later that first week, and the first comment my brother got was “Oh. You look normal, we thought you would come into school with a turban.” All because we had an Indian last name.
Welcome to Granite country. I don’t blame the kids themselves, but the lack of ethnicity and difference of life in a small town. I went to school with only two black kids, both in different grades. So as for my class, we didn’t have one single African-American. How could we have learned about Civil Rights if most kids had never even met an African-American in their life. Jokes about different races felt different, because most people were white. Sometimes you can share race jokes with all people because you know they’re just jokes, but when you say a joke about a black man not being able to support his family, and you’ve never even met a black man. Then something is wrong.
Let me get back to the problem of a small town. Little to no ethnicity, kids get so used to living without ethnic people, that they start to believe that’s what life is like. Then when they are around ethnic people, they become extremely uncomfortable even if they don’t mean it. It’s like how we hear about Jesus, but we never meet him. Kids hear about different races, but if they never meet any of them then the gift of actually seeing a different race is so great. If there’s few black people, then they may call them names and really make them feel differentiated. On top of being like a dolphin in a sea of whales, the black people are called names and stereotyped? How would you feel?
I don’t want to keep trashing my town, I’m an Indian and although some people still do refer to me by my race, I’ve learned to deal with it. It’s kind of funny because my friends are joking, I joke around with them and call them names to. But there are plenty of other northern towns which go through this. Take the state of Washington for example. I had the opportunity to read some one from this state’s opinion on races, and I was shocked. They were even talking about how there were different kinds of Black people depending on their personality. Is the south still the racist part of this country? I lived in Virginia, and I never received better respect, and hospitality. Maybe it’s because I’m younger, but I didn’t really have to deal with racism here, and I had a more ethnic class. I’m not trying to prove anything, but if you travel to the North and South and really get to know some people. You’ll see how things have drastically changed over time.