Racism still happens and pretending it doesn’t is only encouraging a discriminatory mindset to continue in younger generations. Its not just enough to know that racism happens we have to actively do something against it, as that mentality is still embedded in our legal systems, and many types of organisations. We don’t need to be saying horrible ‘jokes’ or physically hurting someone of colour for it to be racism. We have an unconscious bias towards others that we don’t think about but are ingrained in our mental thinking and feeling, such as, who we choose to take a photograph of you and your friend. Racism is heavily rooted in our western media.

I would always say that I understood the extremeness of racism and radicalism but when some more facts were brought to my attention I realised that I still didn’t know the full extent of it in our society.

Stories such as Rosa Park and Martin Luther King are widely discussed and known however other stories such as Emmett Till and his story and struggle with racism shows that I will never really know the entirety of what it feels like to struggle.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till

The real hard hitting fact is that racism isn’t something that we can fix overnight. It will take time and for people to really take action. We, as people, need to stop seeing racism as acceptable and amusing.