Blissful ignorance?

Living in a predominantly Hispanic community has sheltered me from the racism and discrimination that happens all over the Unites States. My parents raised me with morals and values all of which have influenced me as a person; they taught me to always try to be fair, to never judge someone by their look, and to never look down on anyone unless you are helping them up. I take pride in what I have been taught and I try very hard to live my life based on those values. You see, the thing is, I was never able to apply those values to people that were not Hispanic or White. Of course I knew other races existed, but I never really had the chance to interact with people of different backgrounds. As I mentioned before, I grew up in a very small town in the central valley named Laton . Laton’s estimated population size of 1,824 people, where about 76% of the population is Hispanic, 22% White and the remaining percentage is Black or Asian.

When I was young my family moved around a lot, but it we never ventured out of Laton. Every time we had moved, we always knew who our neighbors were and for the most part they were always Hispanic. From elementary school all the way through high school I had the same classmates, yes the classes would be switched around but it seemed like all of the students were rotated. I had no interaction with any other races besides Hispanics and a few Whites. As I mentioned before, I lived in a naïve-sheltered community where I had little to no exposure to other cultures besides my own. I had never been racially profiled against, I had never experienced prejudice because of my origin, and I had never witnessed racial discrimination. I knew that racism existed because my parents would talk lividly about the government being unjust and racist to Hispanics; I knew that discrimination was bad because in school they would teach us about Martin Luther King Jr. and how people fought for equality; I knew that odds of a Hispanic succeeding achieving a higher education were lower. I knew all of these things yet I had never experienced it for myself. In figure 8-2 in Professor Golash-Boza’s book she illustrates that in 2008-2009 the Grade Point Average for Hispanics was 2.84 compared to Whites that had a 3.09 and Asians American students with a 3.26. As high school senior applying to college, I comprehended that statistics such as these existed, but they did not put me down. Instead, it made me proud that I was the exception and that I would prove that as a Hispanic I would succeed. I did not suffer from inequality in the educational system because everyone around me was a similar shade of brown. I was aware that the color of my skin and the sound of my last name was cause for prejudice but that never fully affected me in a negative manner. In my community I never felt the need to “act white,” because I fit in with the many brown faces that surrounded me. In a sense, I never had to switch between a cultural and social capital because it was all the same to me.

Looking back, my experience can be an example of color-blind racism, more specifically minimization of racism. I was ignorant to the idea of racism because I had never personally experienced or witnessed it. Color-blind racism by definition is a racial ideology that explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics. In my case I ignored all of the statistics and logic because I lived in community where my success was recognized because of the work I put into it. Minimization of racism suggests that discrimination is not longer a central factor affecting life chances for people of color. This definition perfectly illustrates the belief that being Hispanic had nothing to do with whether I would succeed or not. I lived in a sheltered community where the color of my skin did not determine how much I would achieve. 
I think the idea of racism still exists because we allow it to. Race is a social construction we give it meaning in society. Everything you do is directly affected by your race and social class, and many times the color of your skin is a determinant of your class. As a society we have been educated and taught that racism is bad, and to outwardly express it is a 'no no.' Yet, we have policies that reinforce everything we "stand against." For example, in the United States we have free public education for all children, and there are programs specifically made to improve or higher student education. The problem with free public education is a quality of the education many students are receiving. The schools in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods tend to have higher drop out rates and lower access to resources. We as a society have placed so much importance on race that we have let it blind us from the inequalities that happen in the work world, neighborhoods, and even educational systems. The laws explicitly prohibit discrimination, but the much larger problem is that the law implicitly only protect whites and those in power.