Dear Reader,
   

I am writing to you to inform you about the racism that is going on in schools. Students using racial slurs against others are leading to very serious problems.
    

Racism has affected me since I started going to any type of school. As I progressed through school, I became more aware of how different I looked from the other kids in my class. I was told that the way I wore my hair was ‘ratchet’ and that because of my skin I wasn’t as pretty as other girls in my class. These remarks were giant smacks to the face. As I grew older, I realized that those remarks were meant to hurt me, but I paid no attention to them as a kid because it didn’t really make sense to me. I want to keep that from happening to other kids; I want kids to stay kids and not worry about if they’ll get made fun of because of their race or how they look.
  

Racism in schools has been more prominent in the upcoming years, and recently in the media there has been a kid by the name of Keaton Jones whose mother uploaded a video of him explaining how he had been bullied by kids of color at his school. Immediately he was given tons of love by people online; they even gave him money but what people failed to realize was that the reason he was bullied was because he kept calling people the n-word which is not okay! His family is very conservative, and he thinks that saying that poisoned word that has a giant history behind it is okay. If that had been a student of color, people would have run over the story.  No one would have cared, and just because he made a video and put it on social media he was granted thousands, but what about the other people (especially people of color) that are getting bullied each and everyday but no one does anything about it.  By no means am I saying that he should’ve gotten beaten up, there could have been a more peaceful solution to keep him from using that slur against others. And in the recent months there have been African-American students killing themselves at a very young age: Ashawnty Davis from Sunrise Elementary School in Aurora Colorado, who was only 10 years old when she commited suicide over the people who were bullying her, and if that doesn’t spark something in you to try and change the way kids treat other in school then I don’t know what will.
  

Others may say that the bullying based on their race/ethnicity is not real and that they should get over it. They may also say that reverse racism to other students may lead to why those students are getting bullied.

Those students are being treated unfairly by others because of the way they look, many students want to change the way they look and act because of others treating them unjustly. Students are being treated unjustly by not being treated with respect by their peers or faculty, treated as ‘equal’ but it’s not fair and many more.
 

To try and fix the problem of students targeting other because of their race/ethnicity we can change the way we teach our students about racism these include different types of literature that include more than one race.
  

I hope that you read this letter and become aware of the issues that children are facing because of racism, and I hope you became more educated on the topic of bullying because of racism.

                                                                     Sincerely,
                                                                Sydney W