Essay # 3

Through the years the media has grown in ways that we never imagine possible but with this growth so has the negative perception towards Latinos. Know in days we are perceived as first of all gang members, shoplifters, and people who come to this country with the purpose of taking jobs away from the rest the population. All this is made possible because of news taking more importance in what minority groups do badly instead of the good doing. Yes, I do admit that there are some Latinos who have done wrong things but its not only Latinos its whites and African American too, But I am still perceived as a Latino.
Now in days we basically have the news at our finger tips and that’s because we can just turn on the computer and their we have them. But back in the days we had to buy the news papers. The news papers often only reported what was going one closed to us but now we can find out what is happening on the other side of the world. What I have seen is that the media is publishing more articles that make Latinos be perceived as people who are always doing wrong. I have noticed that most of the times they add a lot more information that what is really true and that’s because they want to attract the people so that their sales revenue can go up.
The perception that people have towards Latinos isn’t always a good one. We are seen as bad people as people who every time they walk in to your store you should keep an eye on. This has happened to me many times, when I and some friends have walked into a store and the first thing we notice is that there is an employee always watching our every move. As soon as we grab something from the shelves to buy we get followed.
I have even grabbed the attention of cops too. I know that to them mostly all Latinos are gang member and as soon as you see them with a gang color in this case blue or red then you know what gang they belong too. But the truth is that I am not a gang member I am a person who dislikes that because all that you are doing is killing for stupid reasons. I do recall one time when my friends Manuel, Maria, Lucy and I got pulled over. The first question the cops asked us was do you guys belong to a gang? We all answered no and then we had to show them our I.D.s. when I showed him mine his first words where so you are a sureno and all because in my I.D. I am wearing a baby blue shirt. That got me so mad because when we got pulled over I was wearing a shirt that had red strips, so I went ahead and pointed that out to the officer.
Perception can be both ways good and bad. I think that people will always tend to lean toward the bad ones because those are the ones that we hear most often and it so happens that if we hear it many time we will start to think that it is true. I don’t want to be perceived as a person who is always up to doing no good, I want to be perceived as a person who fought in life to get to where he is.