The Role Of Racism In Colonial America

Furthermore, colonized people are prone to develop a colonial mentality, a belief of their own culture’s inferiority in comparison to their colonizer’s. Constant degradation from outside forces weakens the mentalities of colonized people, thus leading them to embrace harmful ideas. In colonized territories, harmful beauty products such as skin whiteners are promoted to uphold Eurocentric beauty standards. “The view that the lighter your skin,” Helene Cooper states, “the “better” you are did not leave the continent with the Europeans, and eventually, science caught up, as skin-lightening products became available throughout the continent” (Cooper). Settlers ingrained the Eurocentric beauty standard of white skin into society, thus providing

Frantz Fanon asserts that “the national bourgeoisie, which has totally assimilated colonialist thought, takes over from the Europeans and establishes a racial philosophy which remains extremely harmful. By its laziness and will to imitation, it promotes the ingrafting and stiffening of racism which was characteristic of the colonial era” (Fanon 160-161). The acceptance of colonial prejudices has assimilated in colonial territories, further promoting racism in society. Bill Ashcroft insists that “[alienation] occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describe a new place, for those whose language is systematically destroyed by enslavement, and for those whose language has been rendered unprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing power” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 9). Society sees English as a superior language, instituting the ideas the foreign languages are “inferior” and inadequate for usage, therefore bringing a harmful message to non-English speakers. With foreign languages being cast aside as “undesirable,” colonial mentalities are further promoted because of the preferment of English. Overall, colonialism has led indigenous people to accept outside influence and

In his book, Beck states that “[Leopold] licensed companies that brutally exploited Africans by forcing them to collect sap from rubber plants. At least 10 million Congolese died as a result of the abuses inflicted during Leopold’s rule” (340). In the Congo, the Belgian king, Leopold, brutally killed many lives by forcing Congolese people into harsh labor. Walter Rodney reports that “in extracting that labor, [settlers] tampered with the factor that was the very buttress of the society, for African ‘traditional’ life when deprived of its customary labor force and patterns of work was no longer ‘traditional’” (Rodney 36). By forcing the local population into labor, imperial powers permanently disrupted the traditional way of life for many people. Altogether, colonial actions have proven to be detrimental to the native population because of disregards to human