What Would You Do?

When we were watching the clips in class focusing on racism, what struck me the most were the clips from ABC News about how people handled racism in an upscale store and a restaurant. I was shocked that more people didn't respond to the blatant and uncalled for attacks on the African American women by the store worker. So many people were too consumed looking for things to buy than to help someone who was being verbally abused. It seemed like many of them had the same attitude as the worker, that the woman had done something wrong or deserved to be harassed. Many people seemed too distant, uninterested, or too intimidated to react. This is unsettling, as civil rights have made so much progress, and yet an African American woman can still be abused in a store, and no one will do anything about it. The same goes for the Hispanic day laborers at the restaurant. There were a lot of people who automatically assumed that the men were illegal immigrants, and told them they didn't have a right to be there, or order food. The fact that people wouldn't even give them a chance because they didn't speak English shows so much intolerance. However, the people who did stand up for the men provided a better outlook. They didn't seem to be concerned with the fact that the men could have been in the country illegally, they were just human beings. In our world today, we sometimes forget that we are all people, and deserve to be treated with the same respect and equality as everyone else.