The Undying Issue of Racism

Danny Wong

May 11, 2014

ASA 002

Valverde

The Undying Issue of Racism

                In the short passage by Mike Ngo describes what a day in his shoes is like to be a former gang member serving his sentence in prison. As I was reading this there was a few segments of where Ngo got really detailed by explaining what was going on and expressing how he felt about what he saw. Assuming most prisoners would feel the same way as Ngo did when he described the prison as a dungeon. In the bottom of the same page he described a scene where he saw a guard talking down to an inmate for violating a no smoking policy. He said the guard talked to him as if the inmate was a slave in a “master-speaking-to-slave tone.” Later in the passage in the part where Ngo describes how the showerheads are allocated. He stated “twenty-eight showerheads for eight hundred men. Fourteen showerheads are reserved for blacks, and the other half for the rest of the population. The Old South is alive and well in California prisons. This shocked me because I thought the whole racist/segregation issue is at least somewhat over in the entire United States, if not then at least more in a state like California. Due to recent news about the LA Clippers owner being racist and reading this learning that California prisons are racists, it makes me think about California as a whole. I have been taught that of the 50 states in the US, California is the most diverse and is the front in terms of reducing racism, but after reading this and the Clippers incident it seems like California is digressing more than it is progressing.

Question: How much longer do you think America needs to reduce racism to a lower percent than it is now?