Hi all, so, at my university, I am taking a class called Africa Studies 200. It’s like a writing and rhetoric studies class but the thing we focus on in our writings are Africana studies. I am a very liberal human being, and if you were friends with me on Facebook you would certainly know that due to the many things I share on Facebook on a daily basis.  That and my love for dogs and Christmas. I only post about those 3 things… or so I was told. So, prior to taking this class, I wouldn’t say I had a poor knowledge on the world but I have come to realize after being in this class for 13 weeks, is that white people suck. I’m white, I can say that honestly, we suck. The Paris attack occurred about a week ago, and the other day on campus a white male student, attacked a Muslim student. He  pushed a girl and pulled her by her head scarf all the while making hateful remarks and threats to this woman solely based on her ethnicity. She wasn’t physically harmed, but emotionally I can only imagine what she is dealing with right now. The man got away and now, students, police, and faculty all over campus are trying to catch this man so that he doesn’t do anymore damage.
There is this app, called YikYak, that is mainly used for college students. It’s like twitter but anonymous. Someone posted on this app the sketch of the suspect for the crime, and that there was to be a rally the next day to show out support for this girl and every other Muslim student on campus  and someone commented with “One guy does this small thing and you guys are freaking out over this? It’s nothing. Get over yourselves.” How can we live in such a world today where women getting hit and threatened based on merely their ethnicity is a thing, and there are some people who don’t see the bad in that? I can’t comprehend with how this is a thing. This is not one small and stupid occurrence. Something like this could happen again and again and we will keep blowing this off.
Back to the Paris attacks (Sorry this is all over the place but I’m ranting and in doing so I am just letting my mind flow free) or not even to the Paris attacks but back to everything that occurred on that horrible Friday the 13th. People are only discussing the Paris attacks because it occurred by Muslims. That is the only reason that it is so hyped. By no means am I trying to play off what happened in Paris as something minor. All I’m trying to say is that there were so many other events that occurred on that day, The Lebanon Attacks, the Mexico Earthquake, just to name a few. But there are so many people who don’t/didn’t know about the other events on this day is because the victims were white Europeans/white European descendants. People in this day and age, and the media especially, are only focusing on white Anglo-Saxon individuals because for some reason people still believe that they are more important than others. This concept boggles my mind. On the day of the France v Germany soccer game (I’m from America so football is soccer and American football is football), an individual tried taking a bomb into the  arena, with what I’m assuming, hope of detonating it in there in hopes of killing many more people than were killed on the 13th. A man spotted this bomber and was able to ensure that he wasn’t allowed to enter. The bomb was taken and detonated outside of the arena (hence the explosion that alarmed those in the arena that night). I’m going to assume that many of you didn’t know that. Want to know why? Because the man who saved the entire arena from dying was a Muslim man. And, a Muslim man can’t be a hero.
It baffles my mind how people are not able to compare every Christian individual with the KKK yet we are able to identify every Muslim individual with ISIS and being a terrorist. This world we live in is not a good one, and there are so many things wrong with the world. Innocent people are being killed, innocent people are being ‘randomly selected’ in airports (yay racial profiling) and innocent people are being blamed for one small group of their religious groups for being absolutely insane, when 99% of them are innocent and only want peace. The world we live in needs work, and the way to not get that done is by being racist homophobic misogynistic assholes. We need to work together to get to world where we can all coexist peacefully and not blame an entire religion for a small sect’s doings.
Talk to you all soon, and hank you for listening to my rant
Alicia