Dulce Salazar
Eva Skrande
Essay #4
10-13-14
When you are young, you are innocent and you cannot seem to notice that social differences exists and you feel just as if anyone could achieve anything in life no matter what you looked like or even if you had less money than others. I noticed racism when I moved to the United States. I lived in Mexico for thirteen years of my life and despite that some people had lighter skin and others darker skin, no one ever judged each other based on their skin color. I used to believe there were no other races in the world because where I lived everyone had brown skin and was native of Mexico, so when I moved to Texas it was interesting to meet people of different races and cultures. I was in middle school and one winter day I remember trying to make new friends and during lunch I sat with a group of Hispanic girls and boys as I overheard them speaking Spanish since my inability to speak English was a burden back then. We were introducing each other and getting to know eachother when they told me to never sit in a certain table. I was very confused and I asked them why and to my surprise they said “Because that’s where the blacks usually seat’’ I asked them what was wrong with that, because to me they were the same thing I was. A person. They couldn’t explain to me what was wrong with them being a different skin color and I still couldn’t understand. To this day I have noticed many things about racism specially while being in school and even more on the internet. Why should a race be better than other? As an artist I was taught that skin color is created the same way only with different shades so why is there a belief that white people are better and more likely to be successful if they are shades away from yellow, brown and black?
Not long ago I read on the internet that somebody asked “Do you really think black people are equal to white people in intelligence?” That person said that the average white person is blessed with more intellectual gifts than the average black person. Race has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence as some basic building blocks to intelligence appear to be genetically linked. Things like memory, spatial reasoning, and pattern recognition are abilities that allow you to understand new ideas, across many different subjects, more rapidly than people that are weaker in those abilities. This is part of what people usually think of as "smart", though some people actually mean "knowledgeable" when they say smart. All things being equal though, a smart person learns faster, and therefore should be more knowledgeable than someone else who has spent an equal amount of time in the same field of study, meaning there is some natural overlap between the two and race is not involved in any shape way or form. Just as there are social and cultural differences, there are also differences in economic classes. I remember when my classmates used to hang out with those who dressed better and overall had more