"Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria" Respose

To say that it is not our fault does not relieve us of responsibility, however. We may not have polluted the air, but we need to take responsibility […] for cleaning it up. Each of us needs to look at our own behavior. Am I perpetuating the negative messages in our culture, or am I seeking to challenge them? If I have not been exposed to positive images of oppressed groups, am I seeking them out, expanding my own knowledge base? Am I acknowledging my own prejudices, thereby minimizing the impact they might have on my interactions with others? Unless we engage in these and other acts of reflection and reeducation, we easily repeat the process with our children. We teach what we were taught. The unexamined prejudices of the parents are passed on to the children. It is not our fault, but it is our responsibility to interrupt this cycle.

I found this was the most important paragraph in the excerpt. I annotated this by underlining the parts of the paragraph that seemed most important to me and wrote some of my responses to them. I thought that this paragraph was the most important because it summed up the entire excerpt well and delivered and important message. It says that everyone has prejudice, but we have the responsibility of erasing it. It says that we need to learn how to keep our prejudice from being expressed and passed on to our children. Most importantly it says that this isn't our fault; but we still need to get rid of it.