Essay

Introduction

The myth of race in America is essentially the myth that all races besides white people are inferior in some way or another. For example, in 2017 there were 152 victims of police killings, over half of those victims were people of color. Also, in 2016, "The Native American poverty rate is about three times that of whites, and over a third of indigenous children live in poverty."." Three-quarters of Muslims report that there is "a lot" of prejudice against them in the United States, and almost half (48%), say that they've experienced discrimination in the past year; however , 89% feel proud to be both Muslim and American.". As seen in the quotes, racism and discrimination is a big problem in America. We have people getting killed by cops who are ironically here to protect us, just because of their skin color. People can't get good enough jobs to support their families, just because they're an immigrant. We both are proud to attend Lima Senior and play sports with that spartan logo on our jerseys, however the dark side of this community is what we are not proud of and unfortunately we both thought that this big problem with racism and discrimination existed largely in Lima Senior. Whether that be the teachers, CPO's, and or fellow students and teamates, with around 1,200 people at this school we thought it was a problem. However after interviewing a teacher who came from a badly racist school with far less racial diversity than Lima Senior, a CPO who interacts daily with hundreds of kids and is a football coach, and students both current and former, we shaped our thesis statement that racism and discrimination wasn't a problem at Lima Senior based on our research.

Conclusion

Our videos message changed dramatically throughout the process of this project. At first our message was going to be how racism was a big problem at Lima Senior that needed to be fixed. However that changed to how it wasn't actually evident in Lima Senior which is the video's message. During the first part of our video you see how we use an interview that talks about how the racism issue at Lima Senior is better than other places, but still a problem in our community as a school which supports our previous message that racism was evident here. Then as we did more and more interviews and realized that racism wasn't actually evident at all based on all of our other interviews, that naturally changed our message to how racism isn't a problem in the LSH community. We thought about still doing how racism is evident however we soon realized that when more than 5 kids said that they have never encountered racial issues, we honestly didn't really have a choice but to change our thesis. Also when we were taking pictures of the kids from LSH on the walls around the school, you see all kinds of diversity with the pictures of kids for spirit week, playing sports, extracurricular activities and that's why we included those pictures in our documentary, to give a visual representation of the diversity and show how the pictures around the school don't spread or influence racism. Also we took videos of kids just walking and talking and interacting in the hallways and you don't see white kids strictly hanging out with white kids and the same for black kids, it's a complete mix of all skin colors all interacting with each other. We believe that since kids now realize that someones skin color doesn't impact their personality or how they act or anything, they simply don't care about the racial components of the individuals because that has no impact on whether or not you like the person as a human being which is how it should be and ties into our thesis well. Finally sports, Ohio is a very competitive state for sports, there are a lot of very good teams in our area which make sports a big and important part of people's lives especially in high school where wins start to seriously matter. We both personally can say high school sports are one of if not the most important things in our lives right now, without them our lives would not be the same and not for the better. This isn't just for us, this goes for a lot of kids who could be out there running the streets, selling and or doing drugs but their sport or sports have saved them from that. That is why you see pictures of the fall sports right now in our video,it is so important that high school kids have that opportunity to play and Lima Senior offers a spot on the team to anyone,no matter their skin color, ethnicity, or anything like that at all.