An Explanation Perhaps?

Alright, here's what I'm going to do, first I'm going to go over what Jack said and then move on to Jasmine's post.

So Jack's little incident, while I know I can't justify what was done, I can at least try to explain it. Whether it be well known or not, racism differs regionally. Sometimes in ways you wouldn't expect. The best way I know to describe it is an incident that happened in my US history class.

One day we were talking about the history of the south and one of the northern kids in my class asked "why people in the south were so racist." My teacher was one of those outspoken types, so he gave a blunt, but relatively true answer (in my experience). He said this "It's not that southerners are more racist than the north, there's just more instances where you can see it down here. If anything the north is MORE racist than the south, because they just don't let minorities in up there." I say true in my experience, because I have family who lives in Cincinnati. One of my cousins came down to South Carolina for college at USC and was shocked. He commented that at his high school there were a total of three black people in the entire school and he was not prepared for how integrated the south is now.

This doesn't really explain the incident, but what you have to keep in mind is that trends for racism even tend to differ between countries as well as regions in the United States. People from different countries have just as much trouble accepting people who are different as we do, if not more.

To Jasmine, the fact is that some people are in fact that ignorant. Well perhaps more oblivious than ignorant. I am willing to bet that this girl was not merely pestering you, or even trying to establish stereotypes. While it is pretty terrible, some people have never actually talked to someone of another race, she might have just been curious.

Once again, I'm not trying to justify these people's actions, just to explain where their actions may be coming from.

-Taylor N.