You need a job, you go to the local grocery
store to apply... but when you get there the manager says “I’m sorry we are not
hiring right now, but the next day they hire someone on the spot but of a
different ethnicity. What do you do? You ignore it and move on, but it doesn’t
always have to be like that.
In
this essay I will be telling you three ways you can survive discrimination
starting with the first way. Ignoring discrimination is the first thing most
people do. When you are faced in a situation where you are lost on what to do
you normally ignore it at first right?
If leaving the situation does not help you can also tell them to go away, that
you are not bothering them. Although you can walk away, unfortunately that does
not always work. This means there are more things you can do. Let them talk;
just let them say whatever they have to say. As long as you do not respond they
will most likely get tired of talking and just stop. Leigh Keller Spanish
teacher at BHS says as long as the one who is being discriminated against and
the discriminator both speak their minds everything should go pretty smooth,
hopefully. Walking away and letting them talk may sound hard to do but it can be
pretty easy. Do not worry there are more you can do and I will explain to you
what they are.
To
respond against discrimination can be scary and difficult to do but anyone can
do it as long as you do it the right way. You have to be careful when you respond
to make sure you do not start a physical fight. You can always start by telling
the discriminator how it is wrong. Always try to stay calm, staying calm is
good because when you’re dealing with
someone who probably doesn’t like differences it is easy to make an argument if
the discriminator does not like what you are saying. So be sure to make no kind
of argument, if the discriminator still does not understand you can do the
switch effect on them. The switch effect works by basically switching the roles.
Show your discriminator how it feels. Ask him how he would like to be called
names or to not be accepted because of his race. This can either go one of two
ways. 1: he can realize that what he is doing is wrong and stop and if they do
understand, be sure to ask how they would feel, deeper thinking can change a
lot. 2: the discriminator witll get more
mad and just keep arguing. Jennifer a student from California says that it is
morally wrong to judge someone by their skin color and that you should judge
them on their personality only. In the “Call of the Wild” buck and the other
dogs were kind of discriminated against because some of their owners just
treated them like nothing they did not care how they felt or if they were
getting the right treatment and they did not care that they had feelings as
well at them.
If
none of these survivor skills seem to work you can always involve people. Involving people is the best thing you can do.
After you have tried to do it by yourself the only thing you have to do is get
help. You can get your friends to help. That way they can help explain
everything that has happened and to report it to someone you know and trust.
You can also tell your parent to help support your situation. All the people
you can get will help in this situation.
Some
might say they are not discriminating just “saying what is right.” For example
in Arizona teachers are getting fired if they cannot speak English fluently or
even if they do not pronounce certain words right. Ali Bradley/Nimitz from Irving
Tx says The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits
discrimination against anyone in the workplace in regard to race, color, religion,
sex, or national origin. It is not discrimination to ask a teacher to improve
his/her pronunciation skills or grammar; the motivation to speak English well
should come with the job. Teachers
are expected to teach and sometimes
heavy accents or a deficiency in grammar can get in the way. Also, teachers are
role models children and teenagers are exposed to every day. The correct use of
the English language is already bad enough in today's society (I hear it every
day from students and teachers)— if a teacher often makes grammar mistakes in
front of a full class, it is likely that some bad habits will wear off. This
law says nothing about firing teachers for this problem, but only to “monitor”
it, and there is nothing wrong or unlawful about that.
I don’t agree with that, students
are going to be around people all the time with different accents all the time
if anything it is making them listen more and be able to understand someone who
does not speak exactly like them. Even if one does learn a language fluently
they are still going to have an accent it is who they are. Even people from
Arkansas speak differently from people who are from New York but does that mean
that they do not speak English fluently…?
So judge someone not on the way they talk or where they come
from or their ethnicity but who they are on the inside their personality, their
ambition in life how far they want to make it in life. Because if you judge
someone on how they look you might as judge yourself for all of your flaws. If
you think about it when you are older and you have a career you might be
working next to someone who is a different ethnicity of you, we live in a
generation where it should not matter on what your ethnicity is or where you
came from but where you are going. Who knows maybe your boss might be of a
different ethnicity of you. So you might want to think on getting used to
things that are different cause after all, nobody is the same.
