Blog #4 "No, where are you really from?"

Long ago I saw an image with a quote circulating around social media:, tumblr, facebook, instagram, twitter, the works. And it was an image of Morgan Freeman during an interview and he was asked the question:

"How do we stop race?"

Morgan Freeman replied with:

"You stop talking about it" 

With the provided context I would have to disagree with Mr. Freeman, but after further research I understand what he meant. The quote was cut off by the people who created the image, "You stop talking about it" in the interview video was actually followed by, "I'm going to stop calling you a white man, and i'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man". This important part of the quote was left out of all the aforementioned pictures and I think that people took the wrong message that he was trying to convey. 

Silencing talks about racism will not make it disappear and I think that people honestly think it will. We need to be confrontational with the facts, almost aggressive in the way we make progress.  Everywhere you look racism is apparent, but people are too sensitive to talk about it?  How can we be afraid of something that is always in front of our faces, maybe they appear in forms of blatant bigotry or sometimes in nonchalant microaggressions but it must be confronted regardless of what shape or form it comes in. 

Our class learns about these problems and after reading classmates blogs I see that we are all spreading our knowledge to people we know, we are also utilizing the use of the internet and spreading it to people we don't even know. The first step is awareness and that is the hardest step to make and it is our job as being in this class to educate others on something we are too afraid to realize, racism is real and it is dangerous.

Attached is the full text of Morgan Freeman's quote:

Here is also a link that I shared on twitter. My friend was part of a project on microaggressions a few years back: http://9gag.com/gag/a3YZ6r5