Racism has been a massive problem in the world for a millennia, so why does it still exist? In so many ways, people have surpassed the common animal and yet we still judge people based on skin tone.
White supremacists still exist, and African Americans still make up the majority of our incarcerated population. These are issues people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X died to end. Barrack Obama became the first African American president in this nation’s history almost ten years ago now, which was a big step forward, but it also took over two centuries to happen. In a nation that prides itself on equality, it took 200 years to elect a president who wasn’t white. This seems like a real problem in this country.
Starbucks, the international coffee chain that you have surely heard of, is now bringing racism back to the forefront of everyone’s minds. The company has recently been involved in a myriad of scandals involving racism, but the problem of racism extends so far past an American coffee chain.
The United States should be such an example of equality and liberty, but it isn’t. The rest of the world judges America quite harshly for its race problems, and they probably should.
We are hypocrites. This country was founded on principles of all people being equal at birth and having inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but according to the U.S. Department of Justice, African Americans make up over 30 percent of the incarcerated population of the United States, even though they make up less than 15 percent of our population. That’s their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness all stripped away, and these Starbucks controversies have shown in a very recent example how so many African Americans are arrested for absolutely no reason.
Hopefully, Starbucks will make forward progress following the criticism they have received, but more importantly, this nation needs to continue making strides toward equality. They have been made surely; slavery is over and voting rights have been granted to all, but we are not all equal. Not yet.
