Alright, this is going to be a rant, and I’m starting out pretty sarcastically. Fair warning, I am probably not going to be coming across as political correct or polite about this.

So, I was flipping through news stories and I found this story of a terrible racist attack. It was brutal, offensive, and down right sadistic. Surely, such a sadistic act had to be the work of a truly hateful, hateful person, to violate his school’s zero tolerance policy on racism.

This is the face of the depraved monster

Yep, that little boy right there. And what, may you ask, did this little boy do? Was it beat up someone, hang them, lash them with terrible slurs that made them run crying?

Not..exactly. He did ask a question though. He asked another little boy if he was brown because he came from Africa?”

What. The. Hel.

That, is of course, asking like asking if I come from Europe or America because my skin is white. Sure, at this point in time, there’s so many races in pretty much all of the “Western” Part of the world that it may not be as applicable as it was fifty or a hundred years ago since we’re all integrated and stuff, but then again there’s been a massive influx of immigration into the “West” as well. Personally, I find it an okay, non-racist question.

This of course, apparently, is enough to get you called a racist in the UK now. His mother got called to his school, and though attempting to defend her son by saying he didn’t even know what racism was (a fair claim in our supposedly post racial world) the school tried to get her to sign a paper stating her son had made a racist remark. I am not sure what said paper does, but I can only suspect that it would haunt the kid for the rest of his life. Thankfully, she refused to sign it.

Sadly, this story is not unique. Though I have lost the original article, there was a similar story (also from the UK) where a little girl was charged with being a racist. Her crime, such as it was, was asking to be put in a different group for a school project than one she was in. That was all immigrant kids, speaking their native language. Which the girl didn’t speak a word of. Of course, this sounds terribly racist, doesn’t it. How dare the little girl ask to be with pupils who spoke her language, in her school, in her country, for a project that would effect her grade, education, and so on, rather than be ostracized by the group she was in, excluded from the assigned project, and likely fail.

I wasn’t aware that asking to be able to be in a group willing and able to communicate with you on a school project was racism now. Are we really to that point, where asking to be able to communicate is racism! Should the girl have let her grades suffer, lose out on education, and spend her time excluded from this group because they refused to speak a language she understood?

Of course, these are but two in a growing list of similar stories involving both children and adults.

Racism is wrong. No one race is better than any other. This is something I truly believe. I was raised with no ideas of racism. I was raised to believe that all were equal. I believe this. But I am starting to wonder if we are really in a post-racial society. I wonder if the dream of MLK jr will ever become a reality, where we can all live together in harmony. Looking at it, I am starting to really wonder. Seeing what happens in the UK, what’s happening all over Europe, what occasionally is starting here in the USA, and what is happening in South Africa (that you won’t find in the news) I’m starting to think that we are not going to have an age of racial brotherhood and equality.

The oldest stories are of revenge, often enough for slights imagined as slight real. Hatreds are stirred against people, often who have done nothing personally against the attacker. And instead of teaching people to be equal and treat each other equally, we’ve had people out there teaching that one group of people is nothing but racists, and that everyone else (no matter what they do or say) can never be racist. We begin to see the fruits of that labor now, and the extremes to which it can go.

I’m just a simple Heathen. My goals are simple. Protect my kin, protect my tribe, show honor to everyone else when they show me honor.

I worry for the future of humanity, because I’ve seen what hate driven by skin color is like (and I’ve read my history) and I believe that all people are equal. Equally good.

Equally Monstrous.