Have you been accused of putting words into someone’s mouth? This is due to misrepresentation, an act every human commits. However, there is a thin line between misrepresenting someone and misrepresenting an action, a cause, a yearning for justice and a counter heterogeneity group. This thin line was not just crossed by Brian Ford, but fragmented by his uncultured remark that discrimination is merely a myth. How can discrimination be merely a myth when people have cried, fought and died to acknowledge that discrimination exists to have a fluidity of change? Ford’s “Reverse Racism Can’t Help Race Relations” (Daily Nexus, Jan. 29) is racist against the manifesto of the importance of acknowledging discrimination by failing to see the points of minorities.

How blind can someone be to declare that our society is devoid of racism, discrimination, even sexism? Ford needs to open his eyes and realize that race has and always will be an issue in our culture and history.

I suppose we imagine that African-American and Latino men get pulled over by the police more often than any other race or group of people, a term named racial profiling, a problem that continues to plague our society, is due to people like Ford who refuse to recognize that it still prevails. If the presence of prejudice is absent in society, why has society made attempts to resolve this so-called “discrimination that doesn’t exist” with programs such as Affirmative Action, Educational Opportunity Program, Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement and Upward Bound? As for Affirmative Action, yes it gave minorities a small push forward, but it is no longer in place and programs like EOP, MESA and Upward Board that currently aid minorities are on the brink of extinction; nonetheless according to Ford it’s simply hype by disadvantaged groups and delirious students.

Perhaps Ford has not experienced discrimination. I therefore believe he has no basis to declare that racism and discrimination do not exist, and therefore attains a mentality in which disregarding discrimination is a way to make it disappear. Disregarding racism is essentially dismissing it. Nonetheless, every day there are numerous examples of blatant racism and white supremacy on the news and other media forms. Everyone knows the tragic story of Laci Peterson, however were you aware that a parallel incident occurred one year before the average American even heard her misfortune? Probably not. The parallel case was that of the ill-fated life of a young and beautiful Hispanic woman who was murdered by her spouse while pregnant with his son, whose body also washed up on a San Francisco Bay shore. Even more recently, all of America was informed of the return of Pvt. Jessica Lynch while simultaneously, Spc. Shoshana Johnson returned from overseas without any media coverage. The difference between the two girls? Lynch is white. Johnson is black. Once again, racist bias prevails. If you’ve seen “Bowling for Columbine” or watched the news unfold in past decades, you know the story of the dead pregnant woman found by her husband who then claimed that a black male murdered her, when in fact her husband did it; why was he able to deceive an entire nation?

There is no “conspiracy.” There exist only people who need to “take another glimpse around” and realize that America is not the egalitarian society it claims to be. Yes, we have freedom. Yes, we have choice. However, how real are freedom and choice when they are so blatantly maldistributed and certain members of our society have to live with fear, shame and destructive mentalities and forces against them? In regards to Ford and his argument against the existence of racism, I have this to say: Despite presence of society’s acknowledgment of discrimination, the reality is that it exists.