Being a seven-year-old is strangely whimsical. Life is candy colored. You are too young to understand many things, like why the sky is blue. Too young to know when the ocean ends. Too young to understand that being discriminated against is not your fault. I’d enter the school building, wide-eyed and with the unjaded mind of a child; I would leave school crestfallen, tears streaming down my face. Why did my teacher hate me? I must have done something wrong. She didn’t smile at me, so I must have been acting rude. She screamed at me in front of the entire class for not knowing the answer, so I should have just been paying attention. Fits from my teacher, bawling my eyes out, trouble with the principal. What had I done other than have brown skin? What could a child–not even a decade old–have done to deserve this treatment from a woman old enough to be my mother?

My second grade teacher was fired shortly after. Racism, I was assured, is not tolerated in the school systems. Still, racist teachers continued appearing in my life, whether it be the deliberate mispronunciation of my name or an insistence that I am not Indian because “I don’t look it”. It never really ends. Growing up in America the child of two colored immigrants is an incurable disease. My eyes were always chocolate-brown in a sea of ocean eyes. But when I entered middle school, and especially high school, there were more people like me. Children of immigrants. Victims of racism. It was infinitely comforting to know that there were others like me, people who had my skin tone and similar experiences.

But as the populations of children of color increased in my town, the demographics of teachers stayed homogenous. Picture dark-skinned children learning African History from a white European teacher. There are not even any classes for Asian History. Rather, there are superficial lessons half-heartedly taught by white teachers once a week barely scratching the surface of undoubtedly complex, vibrant cultures from around the world. That is the education system’s way of combating racism. People are getting upset because of lack of representation, so make a half-baked slideshow on a random non-European ethnicity.

The utter and complete lack of diversity in America is evident. Take the Supreme Court. Throughout history, the demographic makeup of the Court has not been consistent with the parties in a case. Take 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, a case in which racial segregation was deemed legal. Every single Justice was a white man despite the case concerning African-American people. It has taken 233 years for the Supreme Court to have a Justice who is both African-American and female, and even then, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation reeked of racism. She was heckled and scrutinized and her intelligence was questioned repeatedly. What will it take for a colored person to get a job that traditionally belongs to a white person without immediate backlash? It seems Western society will never reach those days.

Racism does not end in the West, sadly. South Asia has largely internalized racism in the form of unrealistic beauty standards and colorism. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been warned by a bullheaded relative not to marry a dark-skinned man because the children will turn out dark. I’ve been ridiculed for staying out in the sun for too long because a tan makes me ugly. Calling someone dark-skinned in India is an insult to their family, it shatters their honor. It’s all too common for South Asian people with swarthy complexions to waste hundreds of dollars on Fair and Lovely, sanguinely rubbing the chemical-scented cream into their skin, falling asleep with starry-eyed visions of pale skin, and waking up the next morning to find no difference. 

It doesn’t end at the color of skin, however. Almond shaped eyes mean you’re Nepali, not Indian. Every Bollywood star will dye her hair chestnut-brown, and every little girl dreaming of becoming a star will get rejected unless she has wide, big eyes, preferably blue or green, and paper-white skin. The image of a girl with pale skin and big blue eyes and light brown hair is not representative of the vast majority of India, and yet it’s the one the crowds cherish. So, no, the beauty standards are not “pale skin.” The beauty standards are, “Caucasian,” even in communities without a single white person.

It may seem like racism is slowly fading with baby steps of progress. But the little instances where it seems society is moving forward reveal layers of racism. Consider the Asian hate following the coronavirus pandemic, and the effects this had. It took murders of innocent people of Asian descent in order for Asian people to show up on advertisements on the television. Proper representation is fueled by corporation’s fears of accusations of racism, just like how school system’s lessons on different ethnicities are fueled by avoiding emails from upset parents.

Admittedly, there are people who truly feel in their hearts that racism is wrong, that everyone should be treated equally regardless of skin color. Though today, it may seem like America is reducing its prejudice towards colored people, this is merely a showcase of diversity. A mask to hide the poison. A band-aid on a bullet wound. Whether these efforts to combat racism are half-hearted or made with genuine, valiant intentions, it may never be enough until racist people accept their flaws and look into themselves. Racism is a disease of the soul, a disease plaguing humanity, and such a disease cannot be treated quite so easily.