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These athletes are taking a stand against something that they believe it. They are using their status, their tv time, to make a statement. They wanted to start a conversation and a conversation is exactly what they got. People every where joined in on the protest. Even students in Kittery Maine joined the NFL players in taking a knee. President Trump even made a public statement about it, trying to encourage the NFL to fire them.

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Athletes everywhere have recently begun taking a knee during the national anthem to protest the on going violence and the racism in America. They're taking a knee during the national anthem specifically to show that they aren't happy with how the country is being run and how they had been treated.

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Although most people agree on some of the more blatant racism, the shouting and name calling, many people's opinions differ when it comes to every day racism. Is a white person ops to stand on a bus instead of sitting next to the black person, are they being racist or are they just choosing to stand or more space? Again, depending on  your "group" or the people you surround yourself with, you'll see it as something different.

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Statistically, 58% of African Americans believe that racism is still evident in today's society, yet only 17% of white Americans agree. Many white individuals interviewed believed that racism towards white people had risen in the last 20 years and that racism towards African American was at an all time low. Is this because whit people are ignorant to racism and African American's problems or is it simply because of people's different perception of racism is?

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When does a situation become an example of everyday racism?

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The Huffington Post comments on the current protest, taking a knee during the nation anthem.

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You know somethings wrong when a citizen of this country calls it hell. This is a problem of our attitudes towards people who don't look like the majority or have the money to act like the majority. The only way to fix it is through a mind change and social reform.

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Americas racism issue has been put aside and instead of facing that, we have focused on the issues it has caused. The poverty, the violence, the police brutality. If we could find a way to tackle the source, racism, then we'd find that many times, those problems would fix themselves.

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Our culture is not their culture and we don't have the right to use these terms that are widely offensive. Nigger has been a word that was used to dehumanize them and within the 21st century, African Americans have taken back that term and made it more of an ironic term but that doesn't mean we can use it.

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Maybe segregation and slavery have been gone since the civil war era, but racism is far from gone. Racism won't be gone until the social concept of "whiteness" is gone. It wont be gone until the average black family holds $100 to every $100 the average white family holds. Racism wont be gone until we take responsibility for all the ways our government and social system has found ways to limit African Americans.

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So many videos have be released after a horrible death caused by a police altercation. Too often those videos are showing either coming on too strong and hurting them, or the police acting too quickly and shooting the victim. Statistically, these victims are black and they didn't even do anything wrong.

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So many people of color are accused of crimes, simply because their color of their skin. Many times, they'll be searched and seized because they resisted an arrest that they didn't do the crime for. Mr. Hatfield explained this perfectly in one of my earlier sources. He said he saw a black guy in a restaurant before hours talking to the owner and thought something bad was happening.

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As Americans, we pride ourselves in the fact that we don't have slavery anymore and in how we broke away from our mother country, but many questions have come up about the reality of how "free" our country really is. Our country was built by immigrants yet, every day, people who look different for don't speak our language are discriminated against.

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Racial profiling is a massive problem. Police officers stopping people with no evidence of criminal activity and only basing it off of race is not only illegal, but also violating our constitution.

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A for all the times I've been profiled for my skin color.

M for making me feel unwanted and undeserving to live in a county known as the "land of the free".

E for everyone locked away just for being dark or just for looking "suspicious".

R for resisting arrest actually meaning just asking "why".

I for insisting that "racism has been dead" since the Civil Rights Movement.

C for calling me a nigger or a colored person when I'm just African American.

A for again sweeping race issues under the rug like anything that actually matters in this country.

Put those letters all together and what do they spell?

The place we stay in. The place we live in. The place that we don't want to live in.

The fact of the matter is that A.M.E.R.I.C.A is starting to look like H.E.L.L if you don't have money or if your skin isn't light enough.

People need to start opening their eyes and stop opening their wallets.

Money and power won't fix everything.

Movement and persistence will.

We need to start turning this H.E.L.L into a H.O.M.E.

Well for the rest of us at least.

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A lot of people, including people in my life, believe that providing opportunities from black families to grow and survive, can take away from their own opportunities. Take college scholarships for example. Many people believe that by offering scholarships to a selective group (black, Asian, native american students), it's taking away from white students. But that's not true. These scholarships are there to even out the playing field and make it possible to students of color to be the first college graduate their family has ever had. Its the same when it comes to cultural appropriation in beauty, black history months and crime. Even in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we see Pap get angry about black Americans having the right to vote. He believes that its unfair to the white community which is a common concern.

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I feel like a lot of times, people can look at a situation and call it racism but too many aren't able to distinguish the difference between racism and prejudice. One of my favorite and most eye opening scenes from this series has a wonderful quote that perfectly clarifies the difference. "Black people can't be racist. Prejudice yes, but not racist. Racism describes a system of disadvantages based on race. Black people can't be racist because we don't stand to benefit from such a system." I think a lot of times this gets over looked and we can write up racism to be just one race disliking the other.

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After watching the entirely of Dear White People, a series on Netflix that highlights the injustices that African American face daily, I was able to make a lot of connections and understand a lot of the misconceptions about racism in America.

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Throughout the interview, Mr. Hatfield mentioned a lot of things that are extreme stereotypes throughout America. The first one that he mentioned that caught my eye was the way he talked about section 8 housing. He talked about it like it was the only reason why there were black people in the community. He felt that by adding it, it would bring in a lot of negative things such as gangs and poverty. Although he claims that the "bad people" aren't just the people of color in the community, he also doesn't say that there are white members of the gangs. Too many times, as a country, we will ignore the negative things that happen with people of our own race, yet base decades of judgement on one negative thing that happens involving someone of color.

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John is a black reporter for the New York Times and he interviews a lot of people for a lot of different types of articles. He's used to the discomfort that some people face when talking about race as a white person but he found he didn't have that problem with Mr. Hatfield, a 60 year old man. When talking to him, Mr. Hatfield said a lot of things that would be considered extreme and racist stereotypes. His comments about gangs and black people in general would have broken the internet but he added a special phrase to it that almost made it seem okay to him. "Some of my oldest and dearest friends are black guys." I feel like a lot of people find themselves using terms like this to justify their humanity, to prove that they aren't racist but they fail to realize that having a black friend isn't the same as understanding the culture and it certainly doesn't mean you're free to say whatever you want. Mr. Hatfield even told John that when he first saw him, a black guy alone talking to the owner of the restaurant, he thought that it was a bad situation. He thought it was a robbery, a break in. He never even considered that John was having a good conversation about diversity and about the restaurant. But even after telling him this, he claims that its wasn't him being racist, but rather him observing and making a judgement of what he saw from what he had experienced.

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This almost funny and extremely ironic article by John Eligon retells an encounter he had while interviewing a man in a generally welcoming and open community.

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While reading about the Irish, you may have realized that it sounds a lot like the current issue that America is facing with the Muslim ban and all the discrimination against the African Americans in the cities. It's because America has a pattern. As my history teacher says, "history is like a swing pendulum. It starts at one extreme and it goes to the other, constantly repeating what it did before." We cut these people out of our country because we're scared of what happened in the past, but when we look back, we caused that to happen. As Americans, a lot of us tend to think of our country as supreme to other countries, and throughout history, we act on that by taking what we believe is ours. We find something or someone or some people who we don't understand and we act on our first instinct which is to think we're more important. As a country, we should attempt to learn about people's religions and their countries traditions before we assume anything about someone.

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Why the Irish are considered "white" in modern day? 

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Why the Irish are considered "white" in modern day? 

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Harriot makes a really good point in his article about how we allowed the Irish to "become white". They didn't change the way they acted to make the Americans happy. They didn't pass tests and become an official white person because race is a social construct. Something that was created that allows us to separate ourselves from people we don't understand or people we don't want to understand.

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In the 1798, the Alien Acts were passed in the US. This gave the president the power to restrict immigration from a country at war with us, deport any immigrant and it also extended the time an immigrant had to live in the states to become a citizen. On top of that, a political party popped up within the next 50 years, believed that immigration should be restricted from Catholic countries to "preserve the American culture.

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In modern day, we consider the Irish to be mostly white Europeans. However, in the 1700's they were considered lazy and the Boston Globe even says that they were were given the lowest paying and least respectable jobs yet still blamed for taking all the good ones. Because of this, they were believed to be unclean, disease ridden, drunks who caused all the crime in the country. Sound familiar?

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Michael Harriot tackles the typically ignored history of the Irish and the discrimination they have faced in America since the 1700's. Although they were not enslaved like the African Americans, they were constantly being shoved down the social ladder because they were considered a "subcategory" of white.

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"I think for white people, I think the experience of being a hip-hop fan and not being able to use the word n****r is actually very very insightful. It will give you a little peak inside the world of what it means to be black. Because to be black is to walk through the world and watch people do things that you cannot do, that you cannot join in and do. And so I think there's actually a lot to be learn from refraining." We created this word as an insult before the civil war. It was to dehumanize the slaves and by using it today, it beings up a lot of negative meaning. For African Americans to use the n-word, its more of an ironic use but for a white person to use it, especially to an African American, it would be considered extremely negative and inappropriate and as a white person, I believe we should just refrain from using it.

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What should I tell my white friends who insist on using the n-word? 

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What should I tell my white friends who insist on using the n-word? 

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"Words don't have meaning without context. My wife wife with her girlfriend use the word 'bitch'. I do not join in. And perhaps, more importantly, I do not have the desire to." I think that Ta-Nehisi is on the right track here. There is a major difference in a words meaning depending on how you use it. Many groups take those derogatory terms used against them and use them within their own culture to change the meaning and to use it ironically. That doesn't mean that it's considered okay for others outside of that to use it still. The controversy around the use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn has been a long battle but I feel like its different for a book to use it for educational purposes and for a child to take that out of that context and use it in 2017.

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Ta-Nehisi, a political writer and racial equality activist, recently spoke to a group about his new book, "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy." Below are a few of his quotes from that event.

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In the 1800's, when America was going through it's industrial era, many Asians came to America to work but they were treated very poorly. Forced to work mostly on railroads, they weren't even paid the same as other workers, even though they made up 80% of the workforce. There was even a law enforced, The Page Law, that forbade immigration from Asia because people believed that the Asian Americans were criminals. When that wasn't enough, they even went as far as to ban all Chinese immigration and also would not allow an Asian American back into the country after taking a trip to Asia.

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In this slam poetry video, Alex Dang gives an emotional performance about what it's like to grow up as an Asian American. Too often we think of race in America as black vs white and we forget all the other people who don't into that category.

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I'm a firm believer that if a group of people for this long, have felt this strongly about an extremely offensive word, we shouldn't be using the n-word. Even in the most innocent of contexts, it still carried negative connotaions that could offend anyone. However, I do believe that it should be able to be used in books such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because its not used without a meaning for it. Mark Twain chose to use the n-word multiple times to acurately use dialect from the 1800's but also to start an important conversation about racism and what is considered racism. This conversation has stayed strong well into the 21st century and I believe that it will last a lot longer too.

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Some may say that only black artists should be able to use that word because it has become part of their culture, but the other arguement is that once an artist releases that music for the world, they aren't just releasing it to the black community. Other artists, no matter what race, can borrow from that and incorporate that into their music, opening the listeners to an even bigger group of people. It's very hard to control a word when you say that only certain people may use it, especially when it's part of something so universally enjoyed like music. I personally believe that it should be a all or none situation because than nobody is confused about that they can and can't say in situations like the one tha music presents.

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In an interview with the Washington post in a series of videos, two women discuss the debate over the n-word and they bring up a very good point. Why are we even debating over this word when there are so many other things that are unfair to the black community that should be discussed. Why can't we just take the meaning out of the word and focus on the important things that affect people's way of life?

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Why is there so much controversity surrounding the n-word?

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Why is there so much controversity surrounding the n-word?

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In our history, the n-word has gotten a lot of attention from a lot of different people. When there were slaves, it was used in place of African American or "black" when describing someone of color. But now, in modern day, it is still a word many people use. There have been debates over who should be able to use it, if it's okay for artists to use it in their song lyrics, and even what kind of punishment people should face for using it in a negative light because of the dark and horrible connotations it brings.

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Toni Morrison's analysis of Adverutre of Huckleberry Finn is a well thought out and very meaningful account of the book. many times, we can miss the reasons why we feel uncomfortable when it comes to a conversation like race but the way that Morrison talks about it, makes it more normalized by explaining it. The way that Twain created the characters makes really think about all of the tiny details that say a lot about society in that time period. By evaluating these characters, we can evaluate how we treated African American in our society and compare it to how we treat them now in 2017.

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Another major point that Morrison makes about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is the lack of an ending for Jim. It is a very unsettleing to think about, not only because of the lack of caring that Huck shows. Jim is a run away slave, recently made free, in a slave state. He has to somehow get back home to his family without the correct paperwork but because of many of the beliefs in the south, he most likely would have been put back in captivity and believed to have been a run away. We want a happy ending for Jim but we know that it most-likely wasn't the situation and that doesn't sit well with a lot of people, as it should.

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One of the most popular beliefs after reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that Jim became a good father figure for Huck. However, after reading through Morrison's analysis, there is a somewhat dark idea that Jim and Huck did not become like father and son because Jim was protective. Huck allowed Jim to come into his life a father like figure because he could control him. He couldn't control Widow Douglas , Ms. Watson or his real father so he pushed them away. But Jim is a run away slave so he has a lot of power over him.

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In our discussions about the book, we decided that Huck was running away from society and the restrictions it put on him. But Morrison brings up the argument that Huck wasn't "running away from external control but from external chaos." Huck left because of his father but he chooses not to return at the end of the book and I think a lot of that comes from Huck's perception of society. He saw people getting killed over not agreeing with others and he learned himself that although he accepted Jim as a person, society would rather kill someone who start a riot than change their opinions.

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This Amazing, Troubling Book by Toni Morrison 

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This Amazing, Troubling Book by Toni Morrison 

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I agreed with a majority of what Morrison has to say. The introduction included a lot about how uncomfortable it is for readers to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and I think that most of the discomfort comes from a lot of the underlying morbidity and chaos in the society that Mark Twain portrays in the book surrounding racism.

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Has anything changed? What's it like now in modern America? 

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Has anything changed? What's it like now in modern America? 

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Although we like to think that we've done a lot for the people who were discriminated against so severely, we actually haven't done a lot to fully integrate Asian Americans into or culture as equal. There have been many debates over the movie industry but I think one of the most important issues is the false representation of Asians and the exclusiveness towards them. Many Asian actors are often put as the smart, witty, sidekick and rarely as the hero in the stories. This happens even in movies based around their own culture. It's called white washing and it's extremely offensive and Hollywood has continuously gotten away with it. Although this may seem harmless to anyone not in the movie industry, we are still watching these films and even if it is subconsciously, we are applying those stereotypes in our everyday life.