Can Racism Ever be Conquered?

Inevitable Privilege

America is a nation of varied races, religions and cultures. Those factors affect American daily life on many levels, which makes America a unique country of the world. As a nation of immigrants, racism has always been an issue that we cannot ignore since the time our founding fathers built this country. For hundreds of years, American have been trying to eliminate racism, and we have come very far, after eliminating slavery and many civil rights movements and acts, but racist still exists in our modern society, transformed into new, varied forms: segregation, stereotypes, white privilege... Which really makes me wonder whether eliminating racism actually can be done.

Before answering this question, we should talk about what racism is. The definition of racism from the Oxford dictionary is: The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. The default concept about racism in my head are usually about the keywords: “slavery”, “colors”, “discriminate”, or “the 'N' word”. After reading “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack”, by Peggy McIntosh, it comes to me that racism is not just about putting certain racial groups at a disadvantage. Like she wrote in her article, “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage”(McIntosh). White privilege is a type of racism. In the second part of the definition: distinguishing race as inferior or superior to another race or races, it refers to putting one...

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...nnot be changed at all. With regard to fighting racism, we have overcome many difficulties up to now. We have improved more than our founding fathers could imagine compared to three hundred years ago, when America was built. The white privilege and racism around today is certainly a huge leap forward from the slavery and explicit persecution of those times. So while it may be impossible to completely jump from the racism today to a racism-free, equal-privilege world in a few years, it may well be possible in the distant future. By recognizing white privilege exists and by improving citizens' moral standards, we can definitely diminish the negative effects of racism. Maybe one day we will treat our skin color just like our eye color: something that we can just ignore when we meet others. But in terms of completely eliminating racism, we still have a long way to go.