Racism in its Habitat

At the beginning of October, I started volunteering at Morse in a kindergarten class every week, and the last time I went, there was a little kindergartener who looked at me for a couple of seconds before asking “Which language are you?” This question definitely threw me off guard (because I didn’t expect her to ask me that out of the blue) and my immediate thought was Oh, it’s because I’m Asian. The five-year-old girl obviously did not mean to question me in any biased way, but that’s what it comes down to. Racism is so ingrained in our society that it becomes a natural thing, even for children.

The idea of natural racism presents itself in the book Song of Solomon several times. When Milkman and Guitar are having a casual conversation, the topic of racism is mentioned many times but is never seriously addressed because the people in the book have come to accept it as a natural thing. In class, we talked about how even the narration in the book describes racist happenings as normal ones. Morrison writes “ Bizarre killings amused them, unless of course the victim was one of their own”, and in this sentence we can see the casual tone of the narrator, making “bizarre killings” seem not as wrong as they really are.

Although the characters in the book have come to accept racism, we all know that this shouldn’t be the case. So, what should we do?

Personally, I think that the simplest solution is to implement the fact that everyone is equal. If we teach the younger generations empathy as well as embody it ourselves, we would eventually be able to eliminate racism as a whole. But I also acknowledge the fact that this is nowhere as easy as it sounds. In the end, as long as we are actively becoming aware and making an effort, progress is made.

Here’s the song for this week:

alextbh - Stoop So Low // https://youtu.be/eVaTTd31in4

I thought of Corinthians and Porter’s affair when listening to this song. Corinthians who is highly educated and comes from a well-off family finds new confidence after sleeping with Porter, a man who has peed on women while drunk and is a part of a group who kills innocent people. Corinthians “stoops so low” because she cannot find happiness in anything else and eventually turns to Porter to fill that hunger. Listen and tell me what you think :)