Racism among teenagers: prevalence and impacts

Racism Among Teenagers

Towel-head, Spic, Polack, Chink, Terrorist, Nigger. These are words heard constantly amidst high school halls; the perfect environment, it seems, to harbor age-old ideas about cultures that do not match the majority's collective perspective. Throughout the nation, there is a current of racism within high schools, spread with the use of entertainment media humor (largely the Internet) and underground movements that are taking the concept of cultural supremacy one step further into a more violent direction. With such a rapid abuse of cultural jokes, bullying, and quasi-revolutionary movements, how do the authorities even begin to curb the hateful currents that underlie in the schools?

In 1987, a Hispanic boy in a Northern California high school almost ends his own life after his friends get into an ugly bout of ridiculing Hispanics in general (Kohl). This Californian is an athlete at his school and a popular student amongst his peers. In 2004, Project Schoolyard is put into motion, and individuals clad in black are passing out "white supremacy" CDs to middle- and high-school students at a rural Madison, West Virginia school (Childress). This project is peddled by Byron Calvert, owner of Minnesota record label Panzerfaust Records, who states that "[they] don't just entertain racist kids, [they] create them!" (Childress). Furthermore, in 2010, a 14-year-old boy is ridiculed for his Muslim beliefs, being called a "towel head" and a "terrorist" by his classmates (Patel). This is because the boy would not eat pizza with pepperoni on it because it is against his Muslim religion.

As we hit the rise of Internet media and social networking, the process of influencing adolescents and teenagers has become a rapidly evolving beast. More and more, high school students are being heavily immersed into the school's social environment, and kids are even more easily tuning into the current fads of the week, month, and year. This includes the usage of hot phrases -- "the bomb" (Patel) -- and the current YouTube virals that tend to amuse and inspire high school teenagers alike. Notwithstanding these effective uses of social media, there is still the downside of picking up terms, phrases, and even ideologies that tend to distribute cultural hate, whether the teenager is African-American, Caucasian, Asian, or Hispanic.

Even underground "white power" musical movements -- ones filled with hate music -- have the apparent danger of becoming mainstream music to high school students (Childress), a danger that can also be easily achievable by minority groups with a hatred for the white supremacists. Yet with all of these warning signs and alarm bells, there seems to be a lack of movement within schoolteachers, principals, and parents, who have a measure of power that can be asserted into the students. Instead of reaching out to the troubled teenagers -- whether the oppressed or the oppressors -- most teachers tend to look the other way (Kohl), almost to the point that by the time the teachers do something about the racism in schools, it is already too late.