Dear Society,

Who do you think you are? The burdens you put on young people’s mind will cause this world to self-destruct. I was walking down the hallways when a Muslim girl walked passed me, yet I did not think anything of it until I heard people gasp behind me. I heard one person whisper, “She’s probably got a bomb in her backpack.” The thing is… the person did not even sound like it was a joke. They sounded so sure.
It did not really hit me until one day I was scrolling through the web and after seeing an image of a Muslim woman blindfolded with a poster saying “I am a Muslim, not a terrorist. If you trust me, give me a hug,” I realized how set we are as humans on stereotyping an entire ethnicity or race. This planet thrives on labeling everyone based on appearances, attitudes, and their accents. We as a nation cannot function without labeling everyone, and some of them are just plain ignorant.

When I was watching videos on YouTube of people dressing up like Muslims, I could only be disgusted at the things people were yelling out to them. In one video, a man yelled, “I bet you have a bomb in your bag, don’t you?” How can someone say that to another person? People in general have started becoming more ignorant towards other people’s emotions, and they are slowly losing empathy for them.

Society, you cannot punish or judge an entire ethic/race because a few people make bad decisions or a few people have something similar within their ancestry. I feel like we should be aware of some things, but we should not penalize a whole group for it. We, as a continent, need to figure out when it is appropriate for racial profiling and when it is unnecessary. This is a flawed world, but we should not encourage people to hate each other just because of skin.

From,

An Annoyed Teenager