Jonathan Sarmiento, Period 2, 3/3/21, Day A

  Socio-political Consciousness

What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and/or power?

    The topic of racial inequality and prejudice is one that has often been shunned by the public in our country. However, due to recent events both this year and in 2020, the conversation can no longer be ignored. While racism against African Americans has been highlighted the most recently, one group's plight that has gone without significant coverage is the rise in violence against Asian Americans. This increase of prejuidice against Asian Americans began when the pandemic began to hit the world hard in early-to-mid 2020, but it wasn't until recently where it got any significant media coverage. Now news outlets are reporting attacks against Asian Americans almost on a daily basis, with a lot of these occurences happening in my hometown of NYC. I've seen my own friends be scared to leave their homes because they don't want to verbally or physically assualted simply because they're Asian. It's extremely frustrating to see my city, who protested tirelessly against the oppression faced by African Americans in this country, become one of the hotspots in this surge of hatred against Asian Americans. Hopefully the exposure that these events are getting will finally get people to wake up and truly see how normalized racism is against other minority communities in our country and help spark some change in the way these communites are treated.

How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

Despite being Hispanic on my father's side, my experience with racism is very different from other Hispanic people. I personally have never been the victim of a racially motivated attack, which is due to me being white passing despite my heritage. However, I have had far too many experiences with people making racist remarks towards Hipanic/Latino people while in conversation with me, not knowing that they said those things to a Hispanic person. Experiences like these really affect the way I view people, as I don't want to associate with people who are so comfortable saying racist things to anyone, regardless of who the racist remark was directed towards. The most frustrating part of it all is that they rarely take responsibility for what they said and apologize, usually either writing it off as a joke or gaslighting me into thinking that I'm overreacting and being "sensitive". One other experience that I've had far too many times is that my heritage has been questioned, or even flat out denied on several occasions. I've had people doubt my Hispanic heritage on the basis that I'm not "Hispanic looking", fluent in Spanish, or "behave" like a Hispanic person. I've heard these things from both other Hispanics and non-Hispanic people, and it made it hard to appreciate my culture growing up because I didn't want to be ridiculed. While my experiences with prejudice are tame in comparison with what other people unfortunately go through, I believe that my experiences help show how casual racism and prejudice is amongst our peers and in society.