Mandatory

(2.) The impact of racism begins early. Even in our preschool years, we are exposed to misinformation[3] about people different from ourselves. Many of us grew up in neighborhoods where we had limited opportunities to interact with people different from our own families. When I ask my students, “How many of you grew up in neighborhoods where most of the people were from the same racial group as your own?” almost every hand goes up. There is still a great deal of social segregation in our communities. Consequently, most of the early information we receive about “others”—people racially, religiously, or economically different from ourselves—does not come as the result of firsthand experience. The secondhand information we do receive has often been distorted, shaped by cultural stereotypes, and left incomplete
Annotating was pretty easy for me on this paragraph because I have a lot of thoughts on what it is trying to say. I wrote a lot of things down. I think this paragraph is very important in this article because it shows how racism is exposed to the world. Children aren't born with knowledge about races. I didn't know about races for a long time. I saw that people were different but I never wondered why like most childeren do. I grew up in a neighborhood were there were people of many different races so thats probably why I never saw it in a weird way. I knew I was different from them. I was different from people in my own family too so I wouldn't think much about it. My parents never taught me anything about race. Later I started to realize why this was but it didn't change who my friends were or what I thought about them.
I think race is mostly influenced by your parents most of the time. That wasn't the case for me. I don't remember exactly how I came to realize race but I know that was school. I never really hung out with a certain group of people. Maybe it was because there was no need to know what was going on. Maybe it was back then it wasn't important.