Stereotypes: The Implications Of Racism

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Surprisingly, I grew up knowing that people “came in different colors.” My parents are white, but until I was two years old I had a black babysitter, who was from Ghana. The rest of my childhood I only had white babysitters, but Florence, my black babysitter, was very close to my family (she was also a friend) and I always had pictures of her and me as a baby on the wall next to my bed. However, as I grew up I never encountered any other black person and I never felt that they were different from us. All I thought at the time is that they lived far away in a different continent (Africa). The first time I understood the implications of race was when I was in middle school (7th grade) and started reading more advanced literature and hearing people’s …show more content…
I thought that because they were born black, they had no future and I started to forget all those ideas I had as a child when the memory of my babysitter was still alive. When I looked back at the pictures of me and her, I felt bad even though I knew that she was just enjoying her life with her family back in Ghana. The problem was that I was constantly bombarded with stereotypical views about blacks and I hadn’t met, since my babysitter any black person in order to reject those views. Everything changed when I left my Greek school after I finished 8th grade and attended an American school for all my high school years. I walked into my first class and saw people from all different races, I was old enough to understand their cultures, but it seemed so strange to me to be in the first in a class with people of a different race and color. Initially, I wondered how these kids felt since they were the minority. I wondered whether they would feel inferior or they wouldn’t hang out with the rest of us. However, as the days went by I saw that they were part of the group. Everyone was friends with everyone and most of the kids had associated themselves with the Greek culture because they had lived so many years …show more content…
I realized these kids knew nothing, but I didn’t blame them because if you were a Greek child growing up you probably attending a Greek school where all the kids were white. Finally, in the 10th grade was the first time I was introduced to American history. That was when I learned about the struggle of blacks in the USA and the Civil Rights Movements. I was simply amazed I just couldn’t believe what the blacks had gone through to get their freedom, it seemed almost unrealistic to me and I thought of white people as evil. I almost felt ashamed to be white, especially when I read about the Ku Klux Klan. Only in 10th grade when I was 15 I can definitely say that I understood the implications of race and particularly of race in the
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