Racism In Short Story

In this society, many judgements are made about people from different backgrounds. This causes many problems between people of other races. Racism can be shown in multiple ways such as by using overt and covert racism. In the two stories “The Stolen Party” by Liliana Hecker and “So What Are You, Anyway?” by Lawrence Hill, there are many examples of racist stereotypes. These stereotypes have many different effects on the people judged accordingly. Maintaining stereotypes is insensitive and divisive; it shows how oblivious society is to people of ‘other’ backgrounds and it is hurtful to those who are judge according to them.

In the first story, “The Stolen Party” by Liliana Hecker, the antagonist, Senor Ines, is using a form of covert racism.

Carole is a mixed girl but Henry and Betty Norton, the two antagonists, keep pestering her to find out her race. While they continuously asked her about her race, they were very insensitive and ignorant towards the fact Carole is just a young girl. One of the quotes that really shows this is, “‘What are you, anyway? My wife and I had been wondering.’ Carole blinks, sees the man’s clear blue eyes and drops her head.” (pg.3) because you can see how confused she is by the question. Since she is just a young girl, she was flustered by their continuous questions. Another quote that really proves just how baffled Carole was by the Nortons questions is, “Carole’s mouth drops. Race? What is that? She doesn’t understand. Yet she senses that the man is asking a bad question. It is as if he is asking her something dirty, or touching her in a bad place. She wishes her Mom and Dad were there. They could tell what ‘race’ meant.” (pg.3). This quote shows just how the questions were affecting her. The Norton’s were asking her questions that she had no idea how to answer because she was unsure of what they meant. The questions made her feel uncomfortable and hurt, however, they kept asking Carole about her race. Another example of racism in this short story is how close minded Betty is towards the idea of mixed children in this world.

Racism plays a large role in dividing entire groups of people and most of the time, the racism comes from stereotypes and assumptions made of each other. One example of insensitivity and divisiveness when maintaining stereotypes is when someone starts asking questions about the said stereotype to another who is affected by it. Such as if a white man goes up to an Asian girl to get help with math because ‘all asians are good at math’. These kind of stereotypes are very insensitive towards others. An example of racism that proves that society is oblivious to how people of ‘other’ backgrounds are treated is the pay and job gap. It is clear, even to this day, that caucasian men and women typically have higher paying jobs and make more than their coworkers of other races. Society should know by now that everyone doing the same job, should get payed the same no matter if they’re a man, woman, white or hispanic. Lastly, there are many examples of how maintaining stereotypes is hurtful to those who are judged accordingly. A large one in our society is the racism against Muslims. People assume the worst of them because ‘they cause so many terrorist attacks’, however, that isn’t true. They are blamed for a lot of horrible events because of their race and culture which in turn, really hurts them. Our world shouldn’t be full of racism anymore, but somehow, there still is a bunch of it