Individualism Fallacies

The United States has come a long way since the proverbial era of slavery that brought blatant, public, and violent discrimination against colored individuals. Also, must not limit our view of racism to just violent acts or we will miss the true identity of racism. Moreover, there are many dilemmas and problematic notions that reveal remaining hatred towards non-whites. We often incur behavior that we shrug off because they are seen as normal thought processes, but we need to examine, question and criticize ourselves, what we accept, and the way others conduct themselves. Three fallacies on racism that have been manifested over the minds of many are the Tokenistic, Ahistorical, and Individualistic fallacy. The aforementioned fallacies must

This fallacy restrains the scope of perception a person can view on racism. It is the belief that racism is solely based on prejudices and negative connotations an individual has towards other races. Through this fallacy, racism is simplified drastically, and incorrectly, to justify and categorized ourselves as racist or non-racist. The spectrum of the individualistic fallacy only portrays the extremities of racism on an individual level. A driving reason for the generalization of the taxonomy of racism is the awareness of the ridicule and harsh stigma attached to a racist. Self-evidently, we try to absolve ourselves from being the “ignorant” one and it completely ostracizes the aforementioned institutional racism, and the habitual, well-meaning qualities of everyday racism. To convey the widespread effect of racism, Beverly Tatum, a president of Spelman College, used this analogy of comparing racism to pollution. She declares, “day in and day out, we are breathing it in” (pg.34). The analogy is a representation of the magnitude and relatability of racism. Therefore, limiting our mindset to mere prejudices and “racist” or “non-racist” is ignoring the true problems and creates a much simplified version of the complexity that is racism. There are a bevy of examples of this misconception, it is, seemingly, engulfed in the psyche of a vast majority of the population. A vivid example of this fallacy was depicted to me when one of my Assistant managers at my job uttered the words “don’t jump to conclusions” in a joking fashion. A pair of Hispanics came into the store requesting that a manger sign paperwork for a job they were instructed to complete. A different manager suspected fraud and dishonesty even though the workers had all of the required paperwork. After all had been cleared my Assistant manager joked about not jumping to conclusions, and it was at this moment that I recognized that we often