Racial barriers: where do they stem?

In AS class in the past few weeks we've been discussing racism and slavery. We were asked the question: Do you think slavery is to blame for the racial inequality that still remains today? This includes standardized test scores, wealth, health, incarceration, etc. At first I answered yes! "Of course it's traced back from slavery!" I thought. In my head I argued that not all walls have been broken down and couldn't have been broken down in such a short period of time. Also, African Americans started developing way after white Americans, having been trapped in slavery for all those years. But then it hit me: we are keeping the walls up. 


I've always been under the presumption that advertisements that include people from many different races are making sure that they are advertising to everyone. After "critically thinking" about this, all it really does is put up racial barriers. Why should a company need to advertise to each "race"? Why aren't advertisements reaching out to the "American". Not a white American, not an African-American, not an Asian- American. Just a plain, simple human. By advertising to specific groups of people, these advertisements make a person believe that they belong to a certain group keeping up the barriers that were established with slavery instead of letting them fall.

As discussed in class, people don't talk about race. I think its our society's biggest taboo. If we don't talk about it, we are keeping up the barriers and so racial inequality isn't eliminated.

Why are the majority of Disney Princesses white? What kind of message does that send? We generalize the races so much in all of our media that we end up fitting ourselves into certain groups, into certain stereotypes.

Another example: Black History month. Believe me, I think its great and very important that African Americans are being recognized for their part in history. But why one month? Why do we have to recognize them this way? It's almost like we made another barrier among the races. Couldn't we have come up with another way? In our society we are keeping up barriers that separate races. They restrain us from moving forwarded and breaking the walls that slavery had originally built up.