Initial Outlook

Even though my goal is to look at this subject in a non- biased way I think the first step towards this is to tell ya’ll a little bit about my back ground…my bias. By doing this I wish to get it all out of my system so that we can get it out of the way when we are seriously looking in to the topic. But please realize that I am just human and sometimes sincere efforts to avoid bias will fall short.

My Bias/ Background
I am a female college student living in the south; I am white and was born to a middle class family. Since my sister was born with a disability (two years after me) I began to see how much society values segregation. They want everyone to fit into nice and neat categories. During my school years my mom worked in a social work job were she saw the poorest of the poor and how differently they were treated. I as a young girl soaked up the stories she brought home and I came to understand my mom’s love toward some of the most amazing people she knew even though society shunned them. Segregation has no positive meaning to me; however until recently I was sheltered from the extent to which our society strives on segregation. There is almost no one who escapes experiencing the effects of it in some way. Last year my family moved and my sister and I were put into racially diverse schools which allowed us to see the differences between our racial group and others. I had unwittingly lived for seventeen years in a small town thinking that the majority of people in America were white or Hispanic ( and that those two ethnicities liked each other)…there were very few people in my previous high school that were African American, Chinese, Vietnamese or any other ethnicity other than the previous two mentioned. What a strange world I grew up in! Seeing the interactions between the teachers and peers of different races I realized two things: people often treated each other differently depending on their color and white people sometimes had an annoying air and attitude that they were better than any other race. This idea they had, this attitude annoyed me to no end. Then this summer I worked in a job where I was in the minority in two ways: the majority of people were a different color than I and the majority of them were men. However I loved it, I loved who I worked with, the atmosphere, and the nature of the job. If anything else my working experience further extended my belief that segregation has no place in society…and it in fact restricts our ability to be the most effective unit as possible. I hope this helps you understand where I am coming from and as an end note I would like to say I know I can not understand the full extent of what people experience in certain categories of segregation for I have not lived it, but then again no one has seen every side of segregation.