When I was in 7th grade my history class, a black kid and a ginger kid got into a fight over who owned some video game or something. The black kid started screaming at the ginger kid that he was racist, and that he was going to have him suspended for it. He yelled to the teacher how racist this ginger kid was.

My teacher was grading papers and he slammed his pen down, rolled his chair to the bookshelf, flipped it open and started reading from it.

“It says here that racism is a hatred and intolerance of an entire race,” he said loudly. and then he flips through the dictionary again and goes, “And prejudice is when a person makes bad assumptions without any prior knowledge of the truth.”

he looks at the other kid who was like this ginger white guy and is like “Michael do you hate Travis? Do you want him to die or think he’s stupid because he’s black?”

and Michael was like ‘no?’

the teacher slams the book down and points at Travis and goes “Stop throwing around words you don’t know! None of you know what racism is. None of you were afraid to go to school, you were never beaten or called less than human! You think he’s racist because he’s afraid of you? No. You’re wrong. Racism is blatant hatred. Racism is not wanting to look at a person who is different than you. It’s wanting to cause them harm and make them feel worthless.”

then he gestured to the whole class and said, “Would you call someone who accidentally touched your butt a rapist?”

some kids giggled, but we all said no.

“Then don’t call someone who doesn’t know better a racist. Dictionaries exist for a reason. Use them.”