Yo… is this racist? By Jackie Groeschen and Grace Rudzinski

19:07:34 My name is Jackie Groeschen, I’m a marketing major in Fisher at Ohio State, and I took this class because I wanted to learn more about the world and the people in it, because I think

19:07:52 that everyone could always benefit for more information and getting more insight and a lot of different perspectives. Definitely, um, my name is Grace Rudzinski.

19:08:04 I’m a business finance major also in the Fisher school at Ohio State, and I took this class because I feel like especially right now and.

19:08:13 Over the summer there was a lot of riots with black lives matter I just feel like there’s so many important topics that arose in 2020 and 2021 that made me want to learn more and like you said get more information on all those topics so, yeah, I think

19:08:29 this class is a great way to like, learn more about those.

19:08:34 And yeah, yeah.

19:08:37 And this is our podcast, yo, is this racist. Today, we will be covering education and redlining environmental racism and also hate crimes. And we think that all of these definitely come together under the umbrella of injustice regarding race, and where

19:08:59 people are from.

19:09:01 So we’re really excited to get into it, for sure. So you wrote a really good systematic injustice.

19:09:08 Little writing about the school zone lines. Would you like to talk about that at all. Yeah, absolutely. So this was definitely the first like initially when I read about the project I knew that I wanted to talk about this, I think that I learned about

19:09:25 this when I was in high school, and some of my classes. And basically what it is is different public school systems, create their zones, based off of what school that area will be going to.

19:09:41 And they draw these quote on quote red lines that can exclude people or put different groups and neighborhoods into maybe a worse school districts, stuff like that.

19:09:54 It also goes into people getting mortgages for their houses.

19:09:59 And that isn’t always exactly fair. A lot of that plays into race, which I learned about a little bit but I came from a private school. So this was not prevalent in my background, but we learned about it which was super cool and I thought that it was

19:10:17 very mature of my teacher, to be able to talk about this in front of her classroom and her students, which was awesome. So, Did you have public schooling or private school.

19:10:41 finish out all my school and public school, and I came from a wealthier town. Yeah, I’m from Springboro, Ohio so I can’t quite understand what some of the kids, you know feel when they are from less wealthy backgrounds.

19:10:52 But I think that it’s so important that we look into it and realize how people may be feeling when you split, put a line in between, who can go here and who needs to go somewhere else.

19:11:04 For sure, but one quote that I found from an article said that at Lincoln Elementary School, 16% of the students come from low income families and over 80% are proficient in reading the school shares an attendance zone boundary with Manierre elementary

19:11:23 school where 99% of students are low income and only 11% are proficient in reading.

19:11:30 So it’s just crazy that, and the same neighborhood, they have such different levels of reading and it’s just, it’s unfair at the level of education that they can get where they come from.

19:11:44 Yeah I think so too. I think that just reading those statistics like, I realized how thankful and like how lucky I was to be able to go to a good school, and then be able to go home and have the resources to study and have a quiet environment and have

19:12:02 parents that were supporting me. So I think that that’s a big part of these huge gaps in the schooling is you know what the students are going home to, and then how the school is actually helping them.

19:12:16 So, you know, the schools they get funds for like after school care or summer camp, or even just like Homework Help knew what schools are getting funded more for sports and all that stuff, it all goes.

19:12:30 It’s really wild, how you know different like these different areas can be when they’re so so close, for sure.

19:12:42 Okay, all right. You want to segue over to our next topic. Yeah, for sure. Okay.

19:12:49 So I also found some research on the environmental racism which I never, that was one topic that I just I never really thought about because that one’s one that’s very new to me too.

19:13:02 Yeah, yeah, I feel like in, you know, you just think of like the environment. Oh, everyone has the same environment. Everyone lives on the same planet like, you know, it’s the same but what I found was that different like water supplies were, like, had

19:13:20 lead in them and Flint, Michigan. And so, that water that was contaminated very much went to the poor areas of Flint, Michigan, versus the more wealthy areas.

19:13:34 Yeah.

19:13:37 Yeah. No, that’s crazy to me because we’re all people you know and it’s like we all need a few things to survive like the bare minimum necessities would be like food, water, and I mean shelter but water so it’s like you can’t be giving certain people

19:13:55 water just because they’re poor you know we all need it, so like it’s literally something we need to survive. So yeah, that’s, that’s crazy.

19:14:03 Yeah, I think, and especially like in that example like it was, it was all over the news like everyone knew about this huge issue, but like I feel like at least from my perspective when it was actually happening.

19:14:19 I just assumed oh you know their whole entire town like it’s it’s everyone, but it wasn’t, it was you know the poor areas that like then couldn’t stand up for themselves.

19:14:31 Right. Say yeah and like the town of Flint is 57% Black 37% white and 4% Latino. And so that, like, primarily black residents in this town and they don’t have environmental safety, but, you know, maybe a predominantly white neighborhood nearby does, right,

19:14:51 is just, you know, weird and shouldn’t happen but at the same time, you have, I just feel like situations like these, like, it’s important for everyone to be super transparent with the information that they’re giving to the media.

19:15:06 Absolutely.

19:16:07 This, I think, has a good connection to the topic that we’ve learned a lot about in class about the one and the other, and just this whole situation of othering and finding this example of how, you know, in this case the white people were the one and

19:16:26 they decided that, you know, everyone else was the other way. Yeah, exactly. Yes, like they weren’t the main focus of this like disaster that was happening.

19:16:38 And so I think that that is like a big overarching like theme within racism is like the one in the other and who is deciding that they, you know, belong, or are better than someone just because of their skin tone.

19:16:54 For sure it’s like who, who gets to say that, you know, we are whatever and this person’s the other, it’s like, how do they feel about you know it’s like where do I come from and why does something good to say that.

19:17:08 Yeah, it’s, it’s super interesting too like this town is predominantly black. Yes, from what I’ve read which could also, you know, who knows, it was one source, but it does seem like people that have a white skin tone decided, you know like

19:17:28 the board was mostly white and like stuff like that so it is very interesting that like that is that just kind of privilege and, but everyone is a resident of this town everyone you know as legal, they vote they are in the town you know they’re members

19:17:43 of the town but they still could be the other. Definitely. And I think it not only goes for people who are black but there’s people have so many other races that feel like the others well you know there’s Chinese immigrants in New York that on a daily

19:18:00 basis struggle with feeling like the other. Um, there’s a lot of Asian hate crime that has raised since the pandemic.

19:18:10 Um, so many people are feeling like this, and it’s just, again, who are we to say who gets to feel like the other, right. So you wrote one of your diary is on the hate crimes, do you want to talk about that a little bit.

19:18:24 Yes. Um, so, I found this one very interesting I actually started seeing it on Instagram so this one, became really prevalent pretty recently, but it’s about the rising or the increasing number of hate crimes towards Asian Americans.

19:18:40 Since the start of the pandemic there’s been a big surge in Asian, or yeah Asian attacks across the country.

19:18:50 Um, I found one article that said that there are so many incidents that haven’t been reported, because a lot of these people are afraid to speak up, or there’s like a language barrier that prevents them from being able to say anything.

19:19:04 So I don’t have the exact number of attacks that there have been and I don’t think there is an accurate number of attacks that have been reported because so many of them go on reported.

19:19:14 Yeah, but yeah that that’s really like just scary because you know you want to think that if something is happening that’s wrong, you’ll be able to speak out, stand up for yourself and get it fixed.

19:19:27 Yeah, absolutely.

19:19:30 Yeah but, um, there’s one occasion that I found or one incident. A man was walking in Koreatown in LA, and he was attacked by two men, things like this happen all the time but not only was he attacked but people go through the neighborhoods yelling like

19:19:46 all Asians need to die like things like that.

19:19:51 And it’s just, it’s really saddening.

19:19:52 Yeah. And it also like as much as the whole situation is terrible. I do think that because it has happened during the pandemic. a lot of people are online more, some people still, you know, haven’t gone back to even going to a restaurant or anything like

19:20:11 that and so a lot of things have been on social media. And I’m not saying at all that everything on social media is true and accurate and all that but I do think is it it has been a great eye opener to start to get people to look into issues like this.

19:20:29 As much as you know, the pandemic has been so terrible I do think that this is one of the very few like good things that has come out of it. Yes, and I yeah 100% I think that everyone being inside more not going out as much as much as that stinks but

19:20:46 it has helped spread awareness to issues like these like all the ones we’ve talked about today.

19:20:53 Um, and I mean we’re nowhere near like solving all these issues but I think that bringing attention is one of the biggest things that we can do to take steps forward and solve issues.

19:21:03 Yeah.

19:21:05 So I do think we are running out of time for our episode today so we’re going to wrap it up. Do you have anything you want to say to close it off grace.

19:22:15 Okay that is all we have for today thank you so much for listening to our episode, we loved talking about the school zone lines, racism from all races, and environmental racism.

19:22:32 So, thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Bye.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *