A Long Way to Go :: Essays Papers

A Long Way to Go Here is what a rival of SCSU students thought about the recent holiday celebrated as Martin Luther King Day We shouldve killed four more of em, and we couldve gotten the whole week off. I heard that and cringed. Prejudice, racism, bigotry, variation . . . whatever way it is phrased, it still means the same amour according to Webster a judgment or opinion formed before the facts are known, or a preconceived idea which is usually unfavorable.Prejudice is found everywhere, and it come tos everyone, not just those being judged. Cringing after hearing the preceding joke was the affect that particular racial statement had on me. But I am sure that after reading that introductory phrase, some readers had an urge to laugh. People incessantly talk about how they are just kidding, or how we should relax, its just a joke. However, that is precisely the point. Joking about a race, color, or nationality is not funny--it is discrimination.The word preconception literally mea ns to prejudge. In Barbara Grizzuti Harrisons essay entitled women and Blacks and Bensonhurst, she talks about a high school English teacher named David Zieger. Zieger wanted to clearly move over the unfairness of prejudice to his freshman class. He said, Everyone with blue eyes has to do homework. The lesson was quickly learned. It isnt fair, they protested. Touch, Mr Zieger, touch. That particular concept struck me as fascinating. To trail such a complex, enduring, and painful subject, and to be able to break it down into such basic terms and get the desired result is amazing. Although Zieger probably was not the first to use this technique, his point was made very clearly.Growing up white with exclusively white people, I did not know the first thing about discrimination. My first experience came when I was twelve. It was our first entrance into the Girls National Fastpitch Softball Tournament, and we were excited. None of us had reached true puberty, and we were all pretty flat -chested and narrow-hipped. Regardless, we were all girls. aft(prenominal) beating a team from Kansas quite handily, their head coach, a male, filed an appeal claiming that some of our players were boys. Our parents were appalled, and we were scared, embarrassed, and angry. Though only twelve, I knew this was not right and we were being discriminated against because we were respectable athletes although we were girls.