When I first asked my mom about the assignment and an act of racism she experienced, witnessed, or heard about, she was stuck. She couldn’t think directly of anything that she’d experienced or seen at all. The reason, as she described, was that we, on the Upper East Side live in a metaphorical bubble. Everyone around us, for the most part, is white. Sure, there are a lot of African Americans, half Asians, and Hispanics, but the predominant race is white. Sometimes it's hard to look past this and that’s why my mom thinks Chapin does such a great job in educating us about our differences and having such an ethnically diverse community. Then we started talking about the definition of race because my family is Jewish and Jews are often referred to as having their own separate race. Our Amazon Echo told us that technically speaking, Jews are not a race, but as we were talking about it, we realized Jews as a religion, face the same issues that other races face.
From there, we thought of a story of anti-semitism that my aunt, who lives in Florida, had told us recently. We called her and got the first-hand story from her. She works at a small boutique shop and a new
For most people in the city, it’s hard not to know someone who’s Jewish, but it is easy to go through your life without facing anti-semitism. On the flipside, the employee at my aunt’s store was stereotypically talking about Jews like she’s met every single one and that they’re all the same, saying they “‘are terrible to deal with,’”. Despite this, she’s probably scarcely interacted with Jews in her lifetime and doesn’t know the first thing about them. Ill feelings towards others, I believe, stems from ignorance and non-exposure to them, while someone who is exposed and interacts with all kinds of people, may not have these negative