Week 2:

As a child, skin colour was never something I would ask about or acknowledge. I feel like I almost never noticed when someone had different skin colour then me. My best friend throughout Elementary and High School was black so, it was just normal to me. I started to notice we had different coloured skin in high school because people felt the need to point it out. We would go out to the mall and people of all skin colours would be giving us a confusing look, it was like they were thinking why is a white and black person hanging out. In school we learned about Canadian history and not about race and different types of culture. This could have shaped society into how we are today because when someone mentions race it can be discriminating so, “if we ignore it and don’t talk about racism it will go away.” If we learned about the black culture in school from a young age I always wondered if I would have noticed her skin colour more or even less. When we don’t talk about skin colour as children, they are left on their own to make conclusions about these differences and can lead to misguided or biased opinions because of the world we live in. Race never mattered to me but in our country it does and always has. Until the Black Lives Matter Movement is when I actually started to educate myself on different skin colours and until university is when I have actually talked about it in a class setting. Talking about race is uncomfortable to me because I am uneducated on the subject and I would never want to say the wrong thing especially because I have a black friend, I would never want her to feel discriminated.