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There is no hiding the fact that the United States has a horrendous history in regards to race. From the Native Americans when the pilgrims first landed in the country to modern day race relations. Racism will never be dead due to the ignorance of individuals who feel they are “superior” to another based on the notion of skin color. Race itself is not biological, not all white people are the same, race is a social construct and ail. We humans put ourselves in the situation when we categorize ourselves as White/Caucasian or Asian. However, race categories are essential to learning about our demographic composition as not only a city, or as a state, but as a country, no matter how awful they sound. Both aspects in the public and private sector …show more content…
I have grown up in a racially diverse area, the San Gabriel Valley, I have been exposed to a wide variety of cultures, the Mexican culture that I share, the Chinese culture, the Vietnamese and even the middle eastern culture. Even though I have never personally experienced racism I have heard and seen racist acts or remarks many times. There are keyboard warriors all over the internet who can put whatever they want without the lash back in public but online. I believe these people do it to troll others and to have others to stoop down to their level as they curse at the original poster. Then there are the individuals who post racially motivated and slurs online. While browsing the internet I came across an article about famous people and their spouses. Out of curiosity, I went through the slideshow and when it came to read the comments the first one I saw already had a racist slur. “Jungle monkeys” due to the fact that many of the famous people were black or married to blacks. After that there were people of all ethnicities putting down people because they “were not really black” because they had one white parent and one black parent. Sadly, this is common on online threads and even in daily life. I have heard remarks like “Uncle Tom” to describe Dr. Ben Carson because he is not a democrat, “camel jockey” to describe those of middle eastern descent, “Ching Chong, Chinaman (popular during the gold rush and the railroad constructing era) and Chink” to describe the Chinese and people of Chinese descent. There are many more slurs, but there are also jokes that make fun of a certain races, religions and essentially every part of life. Jokes like “Why doesn 't Mexico have an Olympic team? Because everyone who can run, swim, or jump is already in America” or “How do you kill a black man? You hide his
As a nation, we have made great strides at improving race relations, but this does not mean that racism is extinct. As was pointed out in the class lecture on the Civil Rights Movement, many things have improved, but the fight for civil rights should be continuing as there is still oppression in operation in our own State as was made clear on the issue of suppressing voter rights. Racism is not born into mankind, racism is taught. This shows that if hate can be taught, then love and respect for others can be taught also.
When speaking about the topic of race even today, it is a sore subject among all Americans. The history of race in America has been a long and trying road, one that most Americans tend to ignore and attempt to gloss over. The book, How Race Survived U.S. History by David Roediger, goes into great detail about how discrimination towards others that we deem different than us has always been in American history, and shows no sign of going away anytime soon. In fact, Roediger states that, “race-thinking will survive and in new destructive permutations” (230). The main points of the book include that: race was gradual, discrimination was not only against those of African descent, and that progress has only
As stated before, racism is not something that people thought of in the last ten years, it is an ongoing theme that has been flowing through the story of the United States. Starting from the enslavement of black Africans, and moving along to the days of when African Americans were separated from white Americans even though they lived in the same country and walked the same streets. Racism is seen all over the world. Hitler killed close to six million Jews during World War II due to the fact that he claimed that Germans were superior. He said that Jews polluted Europe and began “cleaning” it up. “Racism serves both to discriminate against ethnic minorities and to maintain advantages and benefits for White Americans.” This is what Mark Feinberg, PhD, stated about this issue and most people would agree.
It is an accepted notion that race does not define an individual. However, it is an ideology that people have to deal with due to society’s nature. After the collapse of Jim Crow’s laws, race was not supposed to be a limiting factor on any individual in the United States. It had been widely accepted that it was nothing more than a myth. However, due to past transgressions, measures were put in place to ensure that people of color who had been harmed by segregation policies had easy access to tools that would better their lives. The fact that society believes that race is nothing more than a myth blinds people to the racial injustices that still take place. For instance, black people are six times more likely to be imprisoned than whites are. Moreover, three out of every four white persons do not have black friends. The opposite is true for two out of every three persons of African descent (Stockman). Nonetheless, the term race is slowly losing its meaning. A portion of society believes that being black will get you killed, while the other is of the opinion that it gets you a free pass to college. Despite the fact that that racism is a myth, there is still the unbearable truth that racial issues are present with little change on the
Racism (n): the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other race (Wordnet search, 1), a controversial topic in today’s society, a subject that many people try to sweep under the rug, but yet a detrimental problem that has been present in America since the colonial era. Will this dilemma come to a halt? Can all Americans see each other as equals despite their skin color and nationality; and what role has it played in past generations versus today’s generations and how will it affect our future? Has this on going way of thinking gotten better or worse? These are questions raised when many think about the subject; especially members of American ethnic groups and backgrounds, because most have dealt with racial discrimination in their life time.
In the world today, racism and discrimination is one of the major issues being faced with. Racism has existed throughout the world for centuries and has been the primary reasons for wars, conflicts, and other human calamities all over the planet. It has been a part of America since the European colonization of North America beginning in the 17th century. Many people are not aware of how much racism still exist in our schools, workforces, and anywhere else that social lives are occurring. It started from slavery in America to caste partiality in India, down to the Holocaust in Europe during World War II.
In the United States, the problem of equality has never been more prevalent. Equality between race, age group and gender are some of the most common. One that really catches a lot of attention is race. The problem of race started when people from Africa were slave in the United States. Once President Abraham Lincoln free the slaves, the hatred towards the now free African Americans grew premensdly. This lead to segregation, and eventually the civil rights movement. The book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, discuss many topics regarding racism in the United States currently. One of the most interesting topics was the concept that racist is completely different from prejudice.
Looking back at the history of United States in the 1800s, clearly racism was everywhere, and slavery was a major part of society. In the 1900s, racial discrimination still played a major part in society as White Americans were given the rights which includes right to vote, schooling, employment, or the right to go to certain public places. Colored people, did not have the equal rights and freedom as White Americans, especially African-American who back then were turned into slaves. Despite the fact that formal racial discrimination was largely banned in the mid-20th century, this issue of racism still exist even in today's society. The problem with society is that stereotypical views of various races still play a role, like when people always
In the United States, racial relations have changed drastically over a relatively short time period. In Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s, authors Michael Omi and Howard Winant present several viewpoints on evolving and differing racial theories while presenting their own findings and theories that have resulted from years of study and observation. They believe the present and past theories on race and racial definitions throughout history, individually, are severely inaccurate when applied to modern day and “[fail] to capture the centrality of race in American politics and American life” (p. 2). They argue that race is much more complex than how it has been presented and offer up their own theories in order to rectify previously believed notions of race.
Throughout time, some views on particular issues in society change dramatically while others remain unchanged. Sometimes, only one aspect of the issue is perceived differently while the rest of the topic stays the same. This is demonstrated well in the case of racism. In the United States, racism itself has not changed, but the allotment for what is considered acceptable has. Racism deals with the actual outward discrimination upon a race or the mental process of thinking a race inferior to your own. This phenomenon exists in the U.S. today just as it existed in the first years of the nation's existence; however, the way it is perceived has changed drastically. Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe expressed similar though not identical views of the African-American race and a belief that blacks are rational human beings. A hundred years later, Malcolm X held a dramatically different view of racism and the extent to which it affects society as a whole.
Racism: a Short History George Fredrickson makes an argument ultimately against the dichotomy between civilization and savagery, specifically the resurgence of ethnoreligious bigotry that, according to him, replaces 20th century race theory in order to justify continued inequities and sociopolitical oppression worldwide in Racism: A Brief History. His book delineates the rise of modern race theory, beginning in Medieval Europe and synthesizing an explanation for the existence and success of the overtly racist regimes, the United States, South Africa, and Nazi Germany. Fredrickson cautions, however, that racism can easily become interchangeable with religious bigotry when facing corporatism that aims to alienate, marginalize, and devalue human beings as mere consumers with little agency or any collective sense of identity. Racism's ultimate goal, according to Fredrickson, is to establish a permanent hierarchal order that "has two components: difference and power." Fredrickson's analysis is probably one of the most direct and functional definitions of racism that I have run across in a while.
In this world today, hate is becoming increasingly more abundant, especially as it concerns race. Whether it be an unarmed black man shot by a white police officer or the use of racial slurs towards someone, it seems like racism is all around us. In the book To Kill A Mockingbird, it shows a little girl named Scout using racial slurs. Racism is so culturally accepted in the town that it’s okay to use racial slurs such as the N-Word that even Atticus, a lawyer representing a black man falsely accused of rape, uses it a couple of times. Earlier this year, the Ku Klux Klan, a group of white supremacists, held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and proved that racism isn’t a thing of the past.
Racism can take on many forms that plague the brain with irrationality that affects an individual’s thoughts and actions. Racism can be a physical form, through an external action, or can branch off into unethical thoughts. This is more known to be a discriminative thought, judging a person based on impressions. This social problem can also be ignored by the oblivious persons of the crowd. Many individuals speak out about how racial tension is long gone and forever forgotten ever since the first African-American was elected to be president in 2008, but this can be evidently proven false. Racial tension is still here to target the minorities in the forms of affirmative action and Ferguson conflicts.
The Development of Racism Slavery's twin legacies to the present are the social and economic inferiority it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Both continue to haunt our society. Therefore, treating slavery's enduring legacy is necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is not over yet. Loewen 143.
A large problem in America has always been racial issues and still continues to be prevalent in our society today. The United States likes to boast its reputation as a “melting-pot” as many cultures, ethnicities, and backgrounds are mixed together, yet the country still continues to isolate individuals based on race. In the constitution, it says that everyone is supposed to have equal rights and liberties, yet after over 200 years, many minorities still struggle to obtain the same respect and equality that their white counterparts have always have. Laws should be created to enforce equality and justice for racial groups.