Advanced Essay 2: Christopher Jacobs

The main goal of this essay and the essential question I was exploring was, "The discrimination in communities." I wanted to explore this because I feel it is an issue no one really mentions enough with how much discrimination there is in these "communities" that should stick together. I want readers to understand my points and where I am coming from and see if they know of any of the discrimination that I was talking about or if they were unknowingly participating in it. Community Community, by definition it means “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.” But in today’s world do we really stick to that? Do we all actually stick with each other as we should, should it be race, religion, a common interest or hobby or anything really. There always seems to be infighting of some sorts, something to pin people in these communities against each other. In the black community, the Christian, or any religion and race, there’s a certain stereotype being pushed or there is always something else there. Is it because of the media, is it because of our personal agendas and experiences? We truly don’t know what it is, an unexplainable social construct like everything today. So I wanted to explore that and explore the discrimination in all of these different communities. A community I wanted to bring up was the black community. In the black community, we all do have some sort of kinship because of our skin color that makes it easier for us all to talk to each other and relate to each other’s experiences, whether it be of growing up in mainly black neighborhoods, how our parents raised us, and so many other things we all seem to have gone through. But through all of that, and all of that racism and discrimination and all the speeches and preaches of why we should be proud, we found some way to discriminate against each other. Light skins, dark skins, who is beautiful and who isn’t, who is too dark and who is too light. We all seem to attack each other with things like, “She would be pretty but her skin is too dark.” Or other things like “He can’t say, nigga, he can’t be with us he too light to be black.” Or we use derogatory terms for each other like “darky” or “mulatto” because of someone’s ethnicity something they don’t have power over and simply have to do it. Or calling someone an oreo because of how or where they were raised, and considering them not as black because there’s all of a sudden a requirement for you to be from certain “hoods” and do certain “things” to be black. I can’t tell you how many times where I have seen people get attacked verbally or physically because of them not being from the same place or because they aren’t acting “black” enough or are acting “white.” Now do I think some of these aren’t based in reality since many black people do live in the “hood”, yes of course but there needs to be a change to this. Another community I wanted to talk about was the religious community and instead of coming together and talking about our different views and what is so similar people seem to just simply call each other wrong and the ridiculous amounts of war that has been in history simply because of religion and different beliefs. Even in people of the same religion, there’s discrimination over how much religion should affect a person’s life and how much it means to you and different forms of religions and arguments over if certain things are simply much too radical and the spreading of propaganda. An example would be how if you are a Christian they raise you to believe that the Church of Satan is all people who do vile things such as sacrifice and such when they are all regular people like us who simply have different beliefs like putting one’s self first. Now I am personally a Christain and not in the church of Satan but I do believe that propaganda like this shouldn’t be spread around as it is wrong for both sides. ` “During the course of the afternoon, he spent with them Saeed only rarely heard them speak to one another in what he thought of as their odd language.” In this quote, we see what I was talking about and the distance between these communities of people with barriers between people whether it be language or anything else with other mentions in the book considering a part of it at the end was showing the altercations between the community. “And when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.” is a quote I wanted yo use because I feel that it could help push this idea as well and explain the reasoning for this feeling of separation between people as they are all just migrants through time like how people say we are all just here exiting. In every community, there is almost always some form of infighting between the people inside of these communities whether it be because of different opinions or things people can’t control and I frankly believe that it is one of the biggest issues that isn’t ever mentioned today! A community to me means something that brings everyone together without any big conflict yes people can have differences but not to this point in today’s world especially since we all are one big community on our planet that we refuse to take care of. Every person has a community whether it be from race or religion or any hobbies but we all especially live under one community as people and it should be everyone’s right and duty to take care of each other. Works Cited Exit West by Mohsin Hamid