What i've learned this semester

One of the most important things that I have learned this semester is that no matter what your ethnicity is, or what your beliefs are, we are all very similar in a way. Yes, we may appear to look different, and we may come from different backgrounds, and we all have different personality traits but the point is that were all human and we all have rights to live wherever we choose and say whatever we feel. In some of the texts we have covered this semester, there has been situations where people get mistreated and are forced to deal with both verbal and physical abuse because of different factors such as; race, gender and religion. This is shown in "Identity: How do I define mine?", "Melting Pot", "The Kite Runner", "The Rez Sisters", "8th Fire" and many more. I think if people just stopped and took the time to get to know someone before judging them because of the colour of their skin, or what their culture is then maybe this wouldn't be such a big issue today. Today, you'll find many stories on the news about people getting murdered or sexually abused and a lot of it has to do with Natives/African-Americans. This is because of racism and silly stereo-types that people just assume is true with no facts to prove it. I think this is something that will never change. You just can't stop it from happening and its really really sad. Before this course, even I believed that some of those stereotypes about natives were true, it's because no one taught me about it. Now because I know more about this problem and I have more background information on it and after reading many cultural texts, I realized that this is wrong. It's too bad that not everyone can see that because when you think about it their not much different than us.