In one of the segments, they were talking on the lack of black coaches (I can't remember if they were mainly talking college football or basketball), how universities are afraid of hiring black coaches because they feel like the money won't be coming in by the boosters and alumni. Now the reason why I bring this up, is because I'm tired of hearing these same problems in this day and age. You would think we've come a long way from the past, and we have. Yet some of these things are taking too long to get right for a lack of better words, and we still look at each other as black and white first, instead of a person first.So we talk about putting in rules to increase the presence of black coaches, and we talk about strengthening the Rooney rule for the NFL. We still have things like affirmative action in the business world and in colleges. These rules came to be for a reason, and that reason is valid, could still be. (I wonder what would happen if we remove those rules? Would everything return to how it was?) Yet all in all, these rules won't solve this kind of problem. I'm reminded by something my dad once told me. He was drafted into the military during the time of the Vietnam war. They didn't call his name to the battlefield however, but stationed him in Germany. While there, of course by this time the army was intergrated, he lived in bunks with his white comrades. At first, they were all on edge with one another, asking each other questions, some being offensive from both sides of the ethnicity boundary. Yet after a while, they became brothers. So with all that said, it's one thing for someone to be racist or just prejudice from a distance, but when you live with the person, you come to find out we are just the same. So this brings me to my suggestion that would solve things like a lack of black coaches (and not just black but moreso east asian, hispanic, middle-eastern descent coaches as well) or in all professions of US society...
We should encourage interracial relationships! I don't just mean saying there is nothing wrong with interracial relationships, but we should outright encourage it to happen all the more. If every family in the US had close relatives who were a different skin tone than they, we would then be more inviting to people of different ethnicities we see everyday. People at the top would consider hiring coaches of different ethnicities, because they can now relate to that person. In other words they can look at that person as themselves first, rather than just seeing their skin tone first because they will see that person like they see their close relative. I mean how can you be prejudice if you have a white grandfather, a black uncle, an east asian cousin, an arab mother, and a latin nephew? I mean you could, but there will definitely be a lot less racism in the US.
Not to mention you would be mixing every culture of the world together. In the US, you will have people speaking 6 different languages, people eating all kinds of food from all over the world, and personally claiming all of it as our own. We would be the only official country in the world who could say, the country itself belongs to all ethnic groups. (By comparison China is for the Chinese, all the european countries are for those of european descent, and so forth. I'm not saying people of other ethnicities can't live there and call it their home, or anything like that. Yet if you asked me to describe a certain person, and I told you they were french, you wouldn't be thinking of a black person would you? It's different for the US) So this is my plan to end most racism or prejudice in general, because from a natural standpoint, we are all prejudice to a degree.
Again, I'm not just saying we should just say it's okay for persons of different backgrounds to engage in romantic relationships, I'm saying we should downright encourage it to happen. The more it happens, the faster we will see positive change in equality. Think about it, we know our misguided ancestors didn't want the races to mix, and they at one point thought the black ethnicity was sub human. Today we don't see that, we are more educated today but we still have the fear of mixing it up. We also have people who come from other countries to begin a new life here, yet they don't want their children to marry someone who is not of their background. The idea of encouraging interracial relationships and ultimately marriage, would break down all these walls, so we can finally understand one another. We will live with one another, and just like my dad and his comrades in the military, we will receive one another as family.
