1. Brittany Cummings
Harold Blanco
Five Moments of (Accidental) Racism
1. I was in class beside an Asian girl on a Monday morning when my professor stops
reading from the PowerPoint and says, “…this word is in Japanese. I don’t know if I can
pronounce it right…” to which I mindlessly responded to by looking over at the Asian
girl to see if she could possible help the professor in pronouncing the word.
No one told me she was Japanese…I was accidentally being racist by generalizing
her race and language by the way she looked.
2. We’ve been studying the US/Mexico border in my sociology class this week and it has
brought many realizations of how I subconsciously have it engrained in my mind that
Mexican people in America = illegal immigrants, without knowing their individual
situations.
3. I have a friend who makes a joke usually once or twice a week about how, if he has to get
something difficult done in a short amount of time, he’ll just have to have “the Mexicans
in his basement” do the job for him.
4. I was talking to my boyfriend on the phone, telling him a story. I can’t remember the
specific situation, but I remember accidentally and unnecessarily pointing out that the
person in the story was black. His race had nothing to do with why I was telling Michael
the story…I was recognizing and pointing out his ethnicity without reason. I don’t do say

2. “Yeah, this white guy was talking to me today...” so why do I accidentally slip up and
add in that someone is black?
5. Also in my sociology class, there is this male African American student who
speaks/comments frequently during the class and when he does, he has this beautifully
clear, intelligent way of speaking. I remember that during the first day of class, I thought
that his voice did not match what I expected him to sound like. I guess I expected him to
speak with more relaxed sentence structures and more slang. I was, again, accidentally
being racist.