HW due April 1

There have been many experiences, many thoughts, and many different ideas revolving around the concept of race and the idealities of it. Famous american journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates knows all too well about racism. Coates grew up to a very race run family. His father was a member of the Black Panther Party and he grew up in Maryland. In 2015 Coates wrote his second book Between the World and Me which instantly became a bestseller due to the interesting nature of the book and how it touches racism in many ways. Coates described his childhood as such, “Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to the pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into our television sets” (Coates) . This quote explains perfectly about the realism of racism, it is real to every single human being. Whether you are being racist towards another human being or having racism affect your life somehow, racism can be seen in everybody’s life even if there were no intentions of it coming about. The article The End of Race: Hawaii and the Mixing of Peoples written by Olson portrays the last idea about having racism unintentionally affecting your life perfectly. He explains how many centuries ago the island we all know now as Hawaii was affected,“At least 300,000 people, and possibly as many as 800,000, lived on the Hawaiian islands when Captain Cook first sighted them. Over the course of the next century, diseases introduced by Europeans reduced the native population to fewer than 50,000” (Olson). Olson explains earlier in his book that European ships would pass by Hawaii and anchor a little ways off shore. Noticing this the local women (mostly poor) would then swim out to the ships and perform sexual favors in exchange for materials. Diseases then spread and wiped out over 75% of the native Hawaiian population which in their case due to all the mixing of bodily fluids ended poorly due to the diseases even though they never expected for that to happen.

With racism being established as a real problem many people wonder what it would take to end racism. Olson’s argument to this consists of, “Day by day the race vanishes, decimated by the European diseases… There is so much prostitution that it does not exist… One only knows a thing by its contrary, and its contrary does not exist” (Olson). By saying this Olson throws in an innuendo by saying “race” vanishes not racism meaning the racism is outliving the race. While in direct context he might be talking about hawaii we use deeper and more critical thinking about the nature and realize how right Olson actually is. To have an end to racism we would have to have erased it from time because it will always be around as long as we’re alive at least unless there are major changes.