Colonnade

Issue date: 2/16/07 Section: Perspectives

It has been 60 years since the movement for equality started. It has been 50 years since the Supreme Court declared in the Brown v the Board Education that segregation in schools was unconstitutional.
The legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others that braved and fought against discrimination lives on today. It is a reminder that because of them there is equal opportunity for anyone who seeks it.
Opportunity does not discriminate against race or beliefs. It can not tell between brown, white, black, red or yellow. It is the people that discriminate.
I may have been na've, but I did not expect to go to a college where there are still notable tables. Black people always seem to sit on one side of the dining hall. Of course, this problem is relatively minor, but it is a trend that can be seen in any campus across America with tables providing the racial divide and several cultural demarcations that should no longer exist but in memory.But it is not a memory and not another page from a history book. Its reality and it is what we have today.
Of course no one mandated this. There isn't segregation. It's unconstitutional. We just simply sat this way the moment school doors opened every first day of school. The amazing thing is that even as we promote diversity and acceptance, no one stopped us from doing it. The school didn't try to break up the tables. Imagine if they did. I'm sure parents would complain and the race factor would inevitably fly out of nowhere and we would therefore be labeled racist.
When racism comes to mind most people think about the civil rights era or hooded members of Ku Klux Klan. They were painful remnants of that past that so many people fought to change so that we_ black, white, yellow, red and brown can go to the same school together.
But racism never ended, it evolved into 2007. While we no longer use the word "negro" or "colored" we have found replacement words like niggas, Twinkies, Oreos and crackers among many other racial stereotypes that have become in many instances, the very definition of our characters.
We have found new ways to classify ourselves without so much forethought that racial stereotypes accomplish nothing. This is all setting us back.
White people are not the only people capable of racism. In fact everyone is.
The first thing that comes to mind when the word "discrimination" is uttered is slavery or segregation. It has been more than a century since Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves but the word "discrimination" and its history still run deep when it shouldn't be.

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