High School Never Ends

Elizabeth Martinez makes the statement that whiteness could not exist without blackness and I completely agree. Everybody is envious of everyone else, and has to find a way to make themselves look better by putting somebody else down. I find racism to be somewhat parallel to caddy, high school girls.
Naturally, we do not understand why other people live or act the way they do. We all have our own way of living and doing things that we believe is right. Due to this fact, we find other people to be weird or different which throws up a defensive wall that makes us think we are better than everyone else. When we throw up this wall it makes us think irrationally, and start making up stories in our heads to reassure ourselves that our way of living is the way things are supposed to be. When high school girls fight over a boy, they become obsessed with cutting their opponent down to make themselves seem worthy to the boy of choice. The girls spend all of their time thinking of ways to belittle their competition, and not really focusing on the subject at hand, the guy. I think racism is the same way. People become obsessed with putting down their competition, just to build themselves up.
Name calling is probably where it all starts. The high school girls tell their friends that their competition is a “slut” and everything escalates from there. As the stories get passed from one person to the next the names become worse and worse until the competition seems like the scum of the earth. With racism, the escalation starts the exact same way. Someone comes up with a name for the group they are opposing, and before they know it they have convinced themselves that the group of people is worthless and disgusting. As the opposition continues, the names turn into cat fights, and cat fights turn into groups of friends battling other groups of friends. People do not like to be alone. We like others to have the same opinions we do because it gives us security in our thoughts. Racist individuals find others to share their thoughts with, and in no time the world is in one big cat fight. The funny thing is, many people in the groups do not even know how the argument started in the first place. When the high school cliques decide they hate each other and the other group is not worth associating with, I wonder how many people in the cliques know that they hate each other just because months ago, two girls liked the same boy. We live our lives convinced that we are the “right” group, and become brainwashed that we are better than people in other groups.
People say that all the drama is just caddy high school girls. However, I believe that high school never ends. We will always talk behind each others’ backs, we will compete for jobs like we competed for spots of the basketball team, and we will always compare ourselves to the geeks, weirdoes, Goths, blacks, and jocks. Maybe we all just need to grow up.