The summer before my junior year of high school I was a student delegate at the Connections Institute, a program run by the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities. Each day we focused on a new topic: gender, race, ability status, sexuality, and ethnicity. By the end of the session, my mind was really blown. It was such an emotional week, so much crying and yelling, and I often felt manipulated and pushed into saying things that made me uncomfortable. This experience made my teenaged mind focus on prejudice as an issue caused by a group of people. I thought that if these people were taken out of the equation, racism and sexism and all of the bad -isms would just go away.
This class has really made me see how racism is an institutional practice. While of course it is important to eradicate ignorance, the focus of my junior year seminar experience, it is more important that institutional practices are changed. I think the quota system and affirmative action were a good way to get things started in a lot of ways. Will one day come when those ideas are obsolete? I don't think that day will be here anytime soon. With the work of politicians like President Obama I do believe that the United States is working towards institutional changes that really will help stop, or at least slow down, racism.
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