Fire Burns Brighter in the Darkness

She new she was playing with fire. And fire inevitably burns. No matter how beautiful it is when it's burning, it always leads to destruction in it's wake.-Smriti Brar

Today has been a pretty intense day. A large part of our discussion centered around race relations. That's a difficult topic for a lot of people. As a girl of mixed race, I sometimes feel like I don't have a voice. A lot of times, especially in the past year, if someone said something offensive about people of color, and if I said anything about it, I was told that I was being oversensitive. So a lot of times, I say nothing, because a lot of the time, I don't feel heard. I don't feel like my opinion matters, but it's not even just about race.

People are prejudiced against all kinds of things. Skin color, appearances in general. Sexual orientation. Whatever. I have written similar things before, and some people might be like, "Jasmine, get off of your soap box, you're beating this into the ground." That's the thing though. If people would stop oppressing and persecuting people who are different than they are, these things wouldn't have to be beat into the ground. Because, like it or not, black people, white people, Asian people, Irish people, gay people, bisexual people, transgender people, Muslim people, Jewish people, Hindu people  and all other people, we're all people. We all bleed red, we all have heartbeats. We all want to be loved, and we want to be accepted for who we are. We want other people to get to know us before they decide whether we are worthwhile or not. We all want to and deserve to be treated like human beings, with dignity, and respect. We need to stop making generalizations such as all (insert group of people) are (insert negative or positive characteristic). Because not everyone of any certain group of people is the same. We are all human beings, we all have good things about us, we all have flaws, and within each group of people, there are good people, and bad people. You can't just decide someone is a terrorist just because they are Muslim, because, some Muslims are terrorists, but a lot of them are not terrorists. So, yeah. We all bleed red, we all have heartbeats, we are all human beings and deserve compassion.