Race Relations in the United States

To help understand race-relations in America today, it's important to look back on our past/history. We've been doing that with our reading of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's story of the South of the 30's, along with our viewing the PBS documentary, Freedom Riders, that dealt with the 60's. But this all took place decades ago. How would you sum up race-relations in America today, and more specifically, what is your own personal experience with it? What do you see are some of the more important issues, ideas, controversies at the heart of race-relations in America today?

As time has passed in America, Race-relations have improved exponentially but there are still signs of racism. We have come a long way from the early 20th century and the 1960's civil right movements but we still have not completely conquered all racial tension in America. Personally, I have a very diverse ethnicity so I do not have a problem with any race but it is evident that our society still struggle with accepting everyone. In the 21st Century, a big tension in our society is terrorism. We make unreasonable convictions of people who are muslim and ultimately assume that they are associated with them. Throughout history, we have made many unreasonable convictions toward other races. In the 1930s, people would make assumptions about how African-Americans lived and we put them lower on the social chart. It was evident in To Kill a Mockingbird because we see people who know the truth and we see people who have grown in to the great suspicion of the unreason of accusations. I think that we can fully defeat this problem if we all come together and not generalize a whole race. Some modern day examples include the Trayvon Martin incident which brought a national spotlight to our society and developed many sides on the situation.  We have come a long way in America but we still have a very long way to go but it looks promising. We have grown exponentially and have began to realize the impact racism has had on our society in the past and in today's society.