Anti Racism Module 1 Reflection
I just watched videos about racist practices and laws against various minorities in our history, many of which I had never heard of. I learned about Richard Henry Pratt and the boarding schools he started, and the Native American children who were kidnapped into them, and how this practice was replaced by adoption in 1958. This is an example of how even if a law is changed on the surface, the underlying racism will find a new way to present itself in a new practice or exploitation. This is why despite the abolition of slavery or the civil rights movement, racist systems persist.
I learned about how immigration laws have changed drastically over time. There were race quotas. There were more "acceptable" immigrants and less acceptable ones, and these standards changed over time. Less "acceptable" immigrants such as Mexicans around 1917 were subject to dehumanizing practices such as "delousing", having their clothes fumigated, being sprayed with chemicals, being treated like cattle, among other things. During WWII Japanese Americans became "unacceptable" and they were kept in internment camps. Nowadays there is still discrimination in immigration, where people from some (white) countries are treated preferentially.
I also learned about racism in housing. Until 1968, redlining was legal, in which people of color and people living near people of color were denied loans. Even now, people of color have more trouble securing loans-- a study in 2016 demonstrated that people shopping for business loans with the same credentials were less likely to get the same treatment and offers if they weren't white. In the 2000's people of color were more likely to be given predatory loans.
There is also racism in medicine. Historically, black people were experimented on inhumanely, such as in the Tuskegee experiments. A prominent gynecologist tortured a black woman as he repeatedly performed experiments on her, and there are still statues of him in several places. Nowadays, blacks have been shown to receive inferior healthcare. For example, there is a much higher risk of death in childbirth for African American women. So yes this racism persists through time.
Finally there was a segment on environmental racism, which showed that people of color are more likely to live in polluted areas even if they are making more money than white people. Their voices are less likely to be heard so things aren't done about crises like the Flint water crisis. The fact that things like this still happen today prove that racism persists through time in old and new ways.
