Rascism directly related to diversity

Racism is an interesting psychological phenomenon. Although not good, everyone has some. It's unavoidable, people make generalization on everything they see and hear. It's part of human nature. Observe, sometimes, even within a single country, racism exist.

I agree that in general an exposure to ethnic diversity has an effect on racial tendencies. But, at the same time I would like to give you my experience as someone who comes from a very white area. I live in the western part of Massachusetts which for one reason or another is only 2.3% black and 2.3 % Latino. All other counted ethnic origins are almost negligible except Asian which is 1.2%. This area is very similar to most of Vermont. In the particular town I grew up in there was not one person I remember who was not white. Even T.V. at the time had very few shows showing ethnic diversity, unless you want to count ‘’Different Strokes” and “What’s Happening”. (I’ll let someone else comment on these shows if they want.) There were and are some prejudiced and racist people living here of course, but my experience is that they are somewhat in the minority.

My point is going to be that because of this lack of diversity, I had absolutely no experience whatsoever with people of different races and ethnic background, to the point where they almost didn’t exist in my young mind. Then I went to college. When I rolled off the cabbage truck in downtown Boston, needless to say I was in for a different education than I thought I signed up for. But, because I was walking into it with almost a clean slate, I really had no prejudices to trip on. For instance it didn’t take me long to notice that the black guy from Newark, New Jersey was of a completely different culture from the black guy from Haiti. They were both black, but there was definitely no common attributes, aside from skin color in either of them. The differences had nothing to do with race, but had everything to do with culture. We shouldn’t confuse people grouping by culture with racism; it’s simply people being more comfortable with their kin. I can remember many mixed race gatherings where in the beginning, everyone laughed and talked together and got along without issue, but when it began to get later and things quieted down, each ‘culture’ retreated back to their own kind, and you could tell this was where the real relationships were happening. As long as we each had a culture to go back to, there were no hard feelings felt about it.

It is true that if you get to know all the different individual people of any race or culture they will eventually parallel the people you know at home. If you ever had opportunity to watch a documentary on one of those tribes living in Africa that are still basically living in the Stone Age, after a while you can see that even they have the same emotions, jealousies, hopes and fears that we have in our lives.