I randomly remembered an episode of The Oprah Winfrey show that I watched in January of 2007 called The High School Challenge: Breaking Down Barriers. It was about a reporter called Lisa Ling who was sent out to a high school by Oprah so that she could try a little experiment on students at a high school.

Like a lot of high schools, this school was decided by cliques. These cliques were also formed by races. At lunch, all the African-Americans would sit together, the Latinos would sit together and etc and the school had a lot of tension when it came to different kind of races.

The experiment was to gather a bunch of students from different walks of life and put them in the gymnasium all together. The objective was to slowly break down those walls and accept eachother.

When the experiment started all the students that participated gathered in their usual groups but that didn't last long when they started to play games to interact with eachother. Towards the end, there were confrontations, tears, and the most important the students started to trust eachother.

So that got me thinking...is it really that simple? Stick a bunch of students in a gymnasium from different walks of life and different races and automatically expect there not to be anymore racism?

Well, it worked! And the reason why I think it worked is because as they started to talk to eachother they realized that they have more in common with eachother than what they have differently. We're all people trying to live our lives and to STAY happy because anyone can be happy but to STAY happy is the hardest part. They all have their problems and sometimes they have to deal with them while paying attention to a teacher who never seems to stop talking. They got along because they realized they weren't the only ones who were dealing with problems, they realized that skin colour doesn't matter because once you really think about it we're all just trying to live and be free and deal with our problems knowing that we're not the only ones. We're all the same, and we can argue that for hours, but we really are.

Well this is getting a little off topic but I just wanted to leave you guys with this quote.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson