August 1, 2016

Dear Next President,

The United States is the best country in the world and it is a better place than it was fifty years ago, however all the violence that is happening towards people of different ethnicities is worse than all the silence because nobody wants to address these problems clearly. I have been lucky enough to live in a small town where racism doesn't really occur and I have never felt discriminated by, until recently where I attended a protest. I was called several names and looked down upon, and at that moment I knew racism was very well still alive in my town. For this reason, I write you this letter to express my concerns for all the deteriorating efforts that are made to make one human being feel less than the other. Racism and discrimination has always been a problem in this country, but in the last decade racial discrimination has skyrocketed. Xenophobia and islamophobia have given many ethnic groups a bad name, consistent data has proven that age doesn't matter about how racist one can be, and modern racism has taken new forms. In this letter I hope to discuss these issues and provide a solution.

Recently there has been terrorist attacks and economic problems that have caused xenophobia and islamophobia to spread not just in the country, but in the word very rapidly mislabeling people of different ethnicities. Xenophobia has quickly risen over the years as the topic of immigration has come to the front line of American politics. Racial profiling is very common within the United States so much so that laws such as the “Safe Neighborhood Act” allow people (authorities) within the state of Arizona to question the legal status of anyone foreign looking. Because of xenophobia there has been a spark in hate groups growing within numbers in the last decade. The SPL Center reports that within the last year there has developed at least 100 different hate groups within the United States totalling about 900 different hate groups operating in the U.S. currently. The SPL Center has also documented a rise in these groups partly because of latino immigration.

Further exploring this topic of racism, newly conducted studies provided by PBS/KQUED show that age does not matter. There is this whole thought that racial change occurs through generations old and new, however data has proven to show that age has little effect on the likelihood that whites hold racially-biased feelings about those of a different race. Besides the conflicts happening on a national level, traditionally ethnic-international conflicts had to do with problems over resources and possessions of land, and these conflicts over the years could be tied very closely to religious intolerances. For example, the Turkish Islamic Vs the Hungarian Catholics conflict in Europe has been going for decades because of ethnic differences.

Modern racism isn’t what is use to be fifty years ago. Modern racism is situations like the Department Of Housing and Community Affairs only approving tax credit for housing in neighborhoods that are majority white, a case Supreme Court will take up soon this year. Since the start of this great nation racism has been around leading to hate, genocide, and even shootings of the innocent. The news is everywhere and if you're not white in this nation your are three times more likely to be discriminated on, data shows according to a Study conducted by Yale.

Some may argue that minorities are not targeted because of their race or the color of their skin, but they actually do commit crimes or some sort of offense. For example, statistics show that lots of minorities live in poor areas that usually are heavily patrolled by police compared to white people who live in nicer areas. However, even then authorities patrolling these neighborhoods have been know to be harsher and faster to pull a gun. In other situations, some may also say that our criminal justice system does not sentence a person by the color of their skin, but by how serious the crime they committed is. In all fairness that would be nice to believe, but statistics provided by The Sentencing Project have shown that out of the 2.2 million incarcerated over 900,000 are African American and latinos make up at least 20% of incarnated on a national level. When you are incarnating that many people of the same race it makes you wonder how fair our criminal justice really is.

Even though we do not live in the 50’s, modern racism can be found, xenophobia and islamophobia is rising within our nation, and consistent data shows that racism is indeed a problem on a national level. The bottom line is that racism without a doubt is the foundation for hate and needs to be address publicly without any filters. In spite of this, that can’t really be done in a nation as big as the U.S. without conflict . What I propose is that we start implementing programs in our elementary schools diversing kids with different aspects of the world. Only through education can this problem be solved. My biggest desired outcome would be a generation with no biases towards one another, I hope this program mixes kids and they get an opportunity to converse and grow with each other demolishing all hateful discrimination. As Nelson Mandela said,”No one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, background, and religion. People must learn to hate and if they can learn to hate, they can learn to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Best Regards,

Nicholas Dillon