Blog: The Personal Side of Bias, Prejudice, and Oppression

I remember watching the movie "Glory Road" with my daughter. The movie is about the first black college basketball players to play on a white team and all the prejudices they endured while being on the team. It was awesome the way the coach stuck up for the kids and encouraged the kids to be their best in spite of adversity. They had to endure not being able to sleep in the same hotel rooms and not being able to participate in ceremonies for the players because of their race. 

So many things really hurt to see these young men being beaten in bathrooms simply because they played on the white college basketball team. Hearing all of the racial slurs and the constant condescending remarks and belittling really allowed me to see how ugly racism really is. They simply wanted to get an education and be able to play a sport they loved and they were good at it.  It did bring up other incidences in my own life when we lived in Seattle and my son got into a fight because of being called the "N"word. He was in elementary school.  This was ten years ago.  We were also called out of our names because we lived in the Suburbs of the State of Washington.

This hurt but I realized that those people are not all people and do not express the thoughts of everyone. I have never treated anybody differently because they were not the same race.  I believe in order for the world to change, we have to change one by one, seeing the good in people and accepting them for who they are not for what color they are.