Racial Identity!

         Racial identity has never been something I had ever thought of. It was almost a non-issue for me. I was born and raised in a fairly racially diverse society. I had never thought of any difference between my black friends and my white ones. We were all just kids who liked playing baseball and getting dirty. And this was my life until freshman year of high school when I moved to Wisconsin.
        My high school graduating class consisted of one African American and the rest where white. The fact that I wasn't around any black students was the first aspect that started to change my racial identity. The seconond came from the terrible biased local news that comes out of Milwaukee. For four years I watched the news in Milwaukee closely, because of my brother who attended Marquette University lived in the city. And the majority of the crime, that was publicized, that was committed in the city was committed by African Americans. This altered my views of the African American community.
       I initially came into the city in the Reintegration phase of racial identity. I was questionable other races. But as I spent more and more time around the city,  and not just Marquette's campus, i grew more more comfortable with others races and I am slowly advancing up through the stages of racial identity. I feel that I am more into the Immersion stage. I am becoming more comfortable with other races and more aware of my own race at the same time.

White Privilege

          White Privilege is a term for the 'benefits' white people receive on a day to day basis versus the benefits not afforded to black people. These benefits range anywhere from the ability to buy nylons to if you go to prison or not. Most white people, me being a white middle class teen, rarely notice white privilege. And as much as it pains me to say this, but we tend to view it as the norm. White Privilege is can get pretty disgusting; according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, African American woman are four times as likely to die during childbirth due to lack of access to prenatal care when compared to White woman. This shows how dangerous this racism can get, and yet people still don't even think about White Privilege. This needs to change. And as soon as more people take notice of this it will. I have faith in our fellow Americans. This change has to start in our children; we raise them on ideals that we learned from our fathers that they learned from their fathers, and as much as you don't want to believe it, some of their ideals spawned during a dark time for America. We need to seek out the most moral path and teach our children to follow it.