My question is: In China, it seems that our society is largely influenced by the racial hierarchy ideology from Western society. Many people would give preferential treatment to white people and are full of prejudice against black people. How do we become aware of this ideology and what can we do to change it?
Since I live in an Asian country, I used to think racism would be better here than that of Western countries until I met a black guy. He had lived in Shanghai for seven years and he told me that he was very upset about the way he was treated. He is from Africa, and he didn’t even want to tell me his nationality from the beginning. His sadness left a deep impression on me and I started to pay attention to the racial ideology of Chinese people. These years I was shocked by what people said about black people on Chinese social media websites like Weibo and Zhihu. As long as the news or events are related to black people, we can see widespread racially discriminatory remarks against black people. There are stereotypes based on some real events such as ‘black people are all rapist’ and generalized prejudice such as ‘black people are lazy, violent, licentious and carry germs’. After I realize I might also be a racist and I was never taught not to be a racist in my basic education, I begin to think about what I should do.
In the tutorial, people raised some ideas. At the self-level, we can be aware of our racial ideology and change our attitudes towards people from other races. Educate ourselves and see everyone as human. I didn't realize that I am a racist until I talked to the black guy living in Shanghai and exam myself. Before that, I have some prejudices about black people as same as the majority of Chinese people. Now I am conscious of it and talk to black people with the awareness of the racial ideology. At the social media level, we can discuss racism in China since it is not a usually mentioned topic. As Asians, most time we would think that we are the victims of racism. However, we are the perpetrators of racism at the same time and we put pressure on black people. Although posting some comments may not help much, it will bring some changes if more and more people are willing to speak up. There are intolerable voices that some people say they believe there are terrible traits in black people’s genes. Such discrimination against the entire race is unbearable and those who are aware of it should speak up. If many Chinese think that blacks should not live in China, then it may because they think that black people were not Chinese citizens in the past. As Ahmed (2017) said, our mission is to think about how to get closer to strangers, not to assume that they were far away in the past. At the education level, there’s no much we can do. If the government can have education about races in the basic education stage, it will make some changes.
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