November blog post

 “People of Color have no choice but to resist racism every single day of their lives. Women have no choice but to weather the shit storm of misogyny every day of their lives.”

I think that nowadays racism is still a big issue in the world. How many black people have been killed during this year in the USA for no reason? Furthermore, I have a story to share to prove that our society is still racist. I have a friend from Equatorial Guinea who this summer got arrested for no apparent reason, just for his skin color. This happened a Saturday night, when he went out with a bunch of friends to a disco back in my city. He decided to get out from that place to go grab some food at the vending machines. Once he got there, there was a group of white guys kicking the vending machines and harassing an old man that was trying to tell them to stop. My friend decided to intervene and help the old man but when he was leaving, the police arrived so he decided to come back to tell the police officers what had just happened. As soon as he approached them, they started to ask him questions and then blamed him for what happened. They held his hands so that he couldn’t defend himself and they arrested him when nothing that had happened was his fault. While he got arrested, the real criminals left without punishment. My friend had to spend the night in prison and went into trial, he was declared guilty and had to pay an expensive fine, again, just for being black.

Also, how many times have they told us, girls, that we can’t do something just for being females? How many times have they told us we couldn’t play soccer when we were kids because we were girls and we had to play with dolls instead? I have always loved to play soccer maybe it’s because I was raised in a family where all of my cousins were boys and they all played soccer. I’ve always done so many boyish things because of that and always had to hear my mom telling me those were boy things. I remember once that I asked my mom if I could get a skate board for my birthday and her response was “that’s for boys, you are a girl”. The thing is that they have always taught us since we were little that there are certain things related to guys and others related to girls and if you are different from the norm you are weird. We shouldn’t make such discriminations and let everyone do whatever they feel comfortable doing, no matter the gender.

Gender and race equality is still far from being true.