Systemic Racism Vs Internalized Racism

Around the country, people of color will tell you that they’ve been subjected to a government that doesn’t have their best interest in mind, and, for generations, American people of color have been treated as second class citizens. In this day in age, people of color have been using the internet, media, and academia as outlets to discuss systemic racism and oppression. In this essay, I want to inform you on what systemic racism/oppression is, how systemic, individual, and internalized racism work together, and my personal experiences with systemic, individual, and internalized racism. Systemic oppression is defined as the “systematic mistreatment of people within a social identity group, supported and enforced by the society and its institutions,
Spic, beaner, wetback, the ever-popular “go back to your country!” These aren’t words or phrases that should’ve been in the vocabulary of 9-year-old boys, and they certainly aren’t things that should’ve been said to an 8-year-old little girl, but they were. Almost every day in elementary, three boys would sit across from me at lunch and come up with new racist insults to throw at me to make me cry. I quickly learned that they would be the kind of people that I would deal with my entire life. All three of the boys ended up moving away by freshman year, but even my friends enjoyed making “jokes” about my ethnicity. Whenever I would berate them or chide them, I’d almost always get the “it’s just a joke” or “you can’t take a joke” response that was meant to silence me, but it didn’t. Even though I never played along the way I was supposed to by never laughing at their jokes or biting my tongue when I supposedly should’ve, there are still aspects of internalized racism that I often face. As a child, when I was targeted for something that was inherently non-white, I quickly changed it. I was a dark child, and often called dirty. Every summer I would swim for hours and hours or garden with my mom, but the summer after that year, I stayed inside. Whenever we would go out, I would cover up and hide my face in fear of not being pale enough. When a few of my classmates decided speaking Spanish was ‘weird,’ I never brought it up
It’s a problem that’s embedded in America’s past and that will likely redesign itself to fit into America’s future. In order to solve this problem, we need to first address it. People of color have known for generations that there’s a system that’s purposefully been stacked against them. The thing that helps them sleep at night, though, is knowing that we can be the generation that dismantles