Honestly, when I took a class on globalization about 10 years ago, I sincerely believed diversity was not going to be a worldly issue a decade from then. I was an 18-year-old Turkish girl, taking a class on globalization from a Russian professor, at an American university in Syracuse, New York. “It doesn’t get more global than this,” I thought to myself back then. Now, nearly a decade later, I see that many organizations and even countries are dealing with racial diversity problems. According to our lesson notes, social dominance theory states that humans are organized into hierarchies of status, and that people have different views about a social group being in a higher or lower status than others (social dominance orientation).
I would have expected for racism or diversity to decrease rapidly as technology grew; technology allows us to get any information we want, travel to anywhere we want, or contact anyone that we want. With technology, we now know how kids are starving in Africa, how icebergs are melting in Antarctica, or how the civil war is affecting people in the Middle East. How can something that could be used to benefit everyone, created more chaos instead of empathy? How can the President of the United States ban refugees, and even the citizens of his own country from getting to their homes and loved ones?
Hate isn’t a feeling you are born with. Hate is something you learn; just like hate, racism is a learned behavior. I would like to finish this post with a simple article to prove my point that racism is learned behavior. According to this news article on The Sun, “White boy, four, shaves his hair to look like his black friend in adorable hope that their teacher wouldn’t be able to tell them apart (picture below).”
References:
Webb, Sam. (March 2, 2017). Friendship is Colourblind. The Sun Newspaper. Retrieved on April 23, 2017 from https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2997905/white-boy-four-shaves-his-hair-like-his-african-best-friend-in-adorable-hope-their-teacher-wouldnt-be-able-to-tell-them-apart/