what is racism definition essay

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What is racism?

What are some of the societal aspects of racism, what are some of the measures taken to combat racism.

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Racism is the belief that humans can be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the colonization and empire-building activities of western Europeans, especially in the 18th century. Since the late 20th century the notion of biological race has been recognized as a cultural invention, entirely without scientific basis. Most human societies have concluded that racism is wrong, and social trends have moved away from racism.

Historically, the practice of racism held that members of low-status “races” should be limited to low-status jobs or enslavement and be excluded from access to political power, economic resources, and unrestricted civil rights. The lived experience of racism for members of low-status races includes acts of physical violence, daily insults, and frequent acts and verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect.

Racism elicits hatred and distrust and precludes any attempt to understand its victims. Many societies attempt to combat racism by raising awareness of racist beliefs and practices and by promoting human understanding in public policies. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights , adopted by the United Nations in 1948, is an example of one measure taken to combat racism. In the United States, the civil rights movement ’s fight against racism gained national prominence during the 1950s and has had lasting positive effects.

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racism , the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality , and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others. The term is also applied to political, economic, or legal institutions and systems that engage in or perpetuate discrimination on the basis of race or otherwise reinforce racial inequalities in wealth and income, education , health care, civil rights, and other areas. Such institutional, structural, or systemic racism became a particular focus of scholarly investigation in the 1980s with the emergence of critical race theory , an offshoot of the critical legal studies movement. Since the late 20th century the notion of biological race has been recognized as a cultural invention, entirely without scientific basis.

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I , that country’s deeply ingrained anti-Semitism was successfully exploited by the Nazi Party , which seized power in 1933 and implemented policies of systematic discrimination, persecution, and eventual mass murder of Jews in Germany and in the territories occupied by the country during World War II ( see Holocaust ).

In North America and apartheid -era South Africa , racism dictated that different races (chiefly blacks and whites) should be segregated from one another; that they should have their own distinct communities and develop their own institutions such as churches, schools, and hospitals; and that it was unnatural for members of different races to marry .

Historically, those who openly professed or practiced racism held that members of low-status races should be limited to low-status jobs and that members of the dominant race should have exclusive access to political power, economic resources, high-status jobs, and unrestricted civil rights . The lived experience of racism for members of low-status races includes acts of physical violence , daily insults, and frequent acts and verbal expressions of contempt and disrespect, all of which have profound effects on self-esteem and social relationships.

Racism was at the heart of North American slavery and the colonization and empire-building activities of western Europeans, especially in the 18th century. The idea of race was invented to magnify the differences between people of European origin and those of African descent whose ancestors had been involuntarily enslaved and transported to the Americas. By characterizing Africans and their African American descendants as lesser human beings, the proponents of slavery attempted to justify and maintain the system of exploitation while portraying the United States as a bastion and champion of human freedom, with human rights , democratic institutions, unlimited opportunities, and equality. The contradiction between slavery and the ideology of human equality, accompanying a philosophy of human freedom and dignity, seemed to demand the dehumanization of those enslaved.

By the 19th century, racism had matured and spread around the world. In many countries, leaders began to think of the ethnic components of their own societies, usually religious or language groups, in racial terms and to designate “higher” and “lower” races. Those seen as the low-status races, especially in colonized areas, were exploited for their labour, and discrimination against them became a common pattern in many areas of the world. The expressions and feelings of racial superiority that accompanied colonialism generated resentment and hostility from those who were colonized and exploited, feelings that continued even after independence.

Since the mid-20th century many conflicts around the world have been interpreted in racial terms even though their origins were in the ethnic hostilities that have long characterized many human societies (e.g., Arabs and Jews, English and Irish). Racism reflects an acceptance of the deepest forms and degrees of divisiveness and carries the implication that differences between groups are so great that they cannot be transcended .

Racism elicits hatred and distrust and precludes any attempt to understand its victims. For that reason, most human societies have concluded that racism is wrong, at least in principle, and social trends have moved away from racism. Many societies have begun to combat racism by raising awareness of racist beliefs and practices and by promoting human understanding in public policies, as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , set forth by the United Nations in 1948.

In the United States, racism came under increasing attack during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, and laws and social policies that enforced racial segregation and permitted racial discrimination against African Americans were gradually eliminated. Laws aimed at limiting the voting power of racial minorities were invalidated by the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) to the U.S. Constitution , which prohibited poll taxes , and by the federal Voting Rights Act (1965), which required jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression to obtain federal approval (“preclearance”) of any proposed changes to their voting laws (the preclearance requirement was effectively removed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 [ see Shelby County v. Holder ]). By 2020 nearly three-quarters of the states had adopted varying forms of voter ID law , by which would-be voters were required or requested to present certain forms of identification before casting a ballot. Critics of the laws, some of which were successfully challenged in the courts, contended that they effectively suppressed voting among African Americans and other demographic groups. Other measures that tended to limit voting by African Americans were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders , partisan gerrymanders aimed at limiting the number of Democratic representatives in state legislatures and Congress, the closing of polling stations in African American or Democratic-leaning neighbourhoods, restrictions on the use of mail-in and absentee ballots, limits on early voting, and purges of voter rolls.

Despite constitutional and legal measures aimed at protecting the rights of racial minorities in the United States, the private beliefs and practices of many Americans remained racist, and some group of assumed lower status was often made a scapegoat. That tendency has persisted well into the 21st century.

Because, in the popular mind, “race” is linked to physical differences among peoples, and such features as dark skin colour have been seen as markers of low status, some experts believe that racism may be difficult to eradicate . Indeed, minds cannot be changed by laws, but beliefs about human differences can and do change, as do all cultural elements.

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What Is Racism?

Below is the audio recording of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Berggruen Prize Lecture, given at the 2024 Pacific Division Meeting and made possible through the generosity of the Berggruen Institute. The talk is titled “What Is Racism?” and in it Appiah uses the murder of George Floyd as a starting point to explore the broader issue of racism in America. He notes the lack of consensus on the definition of racism and proposes an account of it as an ideology involving beliefs in inherited racial essences and the superiority or inferiority of different races. This ideology then manifests in discriminatory attitudes, feelings, and institutional practices that serve to oppress certain racial groups. Appiah argues that to address racism, we must dismantle the racist ideologies that sustain this oppression in order to build a more just and equitable society.

The audio of the lecture is available here:

“ What Is Racism? ” by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center Human Values Emeritus at Princeton University. He holds a BA and a PhD in Philosophy from Clare College, Cambridge University. Appiah has served as president of the APA’s Eastern Division (2007–2008) and chair of the APA board of officers (2008–2011), as well as on the boards of the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, New York’s Public Library, the Public Theater, and the PEN American Center. In 2012, President Obama presented him with the National Humanities Medal. His publications include Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers , Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity , As If: Idealization and Ideals , and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity , along with three novels.

Learn more about the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture and Berggruen Prize Essay Competition .

• Berggruen Prize Lecture
• Kwame Anthony Appiah
• Pacific Division
• philosophy of race

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What Is Racism: Definition and Examples

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Dictionary Definition of Racism

Sociological definition of racism, discrimination today.

• Internalized and Horizontal Racism

Reverse Racism

• M.A., English and Comparative Literary Studies, Occidental College
• B.A., English, Comparative Literature, and American Studies, Occidental College

What is racism, really? The use of the term racism has become so popular that it’s spun off related terms such as reverse racism, horizontal racism, and internalized racism .

Let’s start by examining the most basic definition of racism—the dictionary meaning. According to the American Heritage College Dictionary, racism has two meanings. This resource first defines racism as, “The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others” and secondly as, “ Discrimination or prejudice based on race.”

Examples of the first definition abound throughout history. When enslavement was practiced in the United States, Black people were not only considered inferior to White people but also regarded as property rather than human beings. During the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, lawmakers agreed that enslaved individuals were to be considered three-fifths people for the purposes of taxation and representation. Generally speaking, during the era of enslavement, Black people were deemed intellectually inferior to White people as well. Some Americans believe this still today.

In 1994, a book called "The Bell Curve" posited that genetics were to blame for Black people traditionally scoring lower than White people on intelligence tests. The book was attacked by many including New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who argued that social factors were responsible for the differential, and Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that the authors made conclusions unsupported by scientific research.

However, this pushback has done little to stifle racism, even in academia. In 2007, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson ignited similar controversy when he suggested that Black people were less intelligent than White people.

The sociological definition of racism is much more complex. In sociology, racism is defined as an ideology that prescribes statuses to racial groups based on perceived differences. Though races are not inherently unequal, racism forces this narrative. Genetics and biology do not support or even suggest racial inequality, contrary to what many people—often even scholars—believe. Racial discrimination, based on manufactured inequalities, is a direct product of racism that brings these notions of difference into reality. Institutional racism permits inequality in legislation, education, public health, and more. Racism is allowed to spread further through the racialization of systems that affect nearly every aspect of life, and this combined with widespread discrimination results in racism that is systemic—allowed to exist by society as a whole and internalized by a majority to some extent.

Racism creates power dynamics that follow these patterns of perceived imbalance, which are exploited in order to preserve feelings of superiority in the "dominant" race and inferiority in the "subservient" race, even to blame the victims of oppression for their own situations. Unfortunately, these victims often unwittingly play a role in the continuation of racism. Scholar Karen Pyke points out that "all systems of inequality are maintained and reproduced, in part, through their internalization by the oppressed." Even though racial groups are equal at the most basic level, groups assigned lesser statuses are oppressed and treated as though they are not equal because they are perceived not to be. Even when subconsciously held, these beliefs serve to further divide racial groups from one another. Radical versions of racism such as white supremacy make overt the unspoken ideologies within racism: that certain races are superior to others and should be allowed to hold more societal power.

Racism persists in modern society, often taking the form of discrimination. Case in point: Black unemployment  has consistently soared above White unemployment for decades. Why? Numerous studies indicate that racism advantaging White people at the expense of Black people contributes to unemployment gaps between races.

For example, in 2003, researchers at the University of Chicago and MIT released a study involving 5,000 fake resumes, finding that 10% of resumes featuring “Caucasian-sounding” names were called back compared to just 6.7% of resumes featuring “Black-sounding” names. Moreover, resumes featuring names such as Tamika and Aisha were called back just 5% and 2% of the time. The skill level of the faux Black candidates made no impact on callback rates.

Internalized Racism and Horizontal Racism

Internalized racism is not always or even usually seen as a person from a racial group in power believing subconsciously that they are better than people of other races. It can often be seen as a person from a marginalized group believing, perhaps unconsciously, that White people are superior.

A highly publicized example of this is a 1940 study devised by Dr. Kenneth and Mamie to pinpoint the negative psychological effects of segregation on young Black children. Given the choice between dolls completely identical in every way except for their color, Black children disproportionately chose dolls with white skin, often even going so far as to refer to the dark-skinned dolls with derision and epithets.

In 2005, teen filmmaker Kiri Davis conducted a similar study, finding that 64% of Black girls interviewed preferred White dolls. The girls attributed physical traits associated with White people, such as straighter hair, with being more desirable than traits associated with Black people.

Horizontal racism occurs when members of minority groups adopt racist attitudes toward other minority groups. An example of this would be if a Japanese American prejudged a Mexican American based on the racist stereotypes of Latinos found in mainstream culture.

“Reverse racism” refers to supposed anti-White discrimination. This term is often used in conjunction with practices designed to help people of color, such as affirmative action .

To be clear, reverse racism does not exist. It’s also worth noting that in response to living in a racially stratified society, Black people sometimes complain about White people. Typically, such complaints are used as coping mechanisms for withstanding racism, not as a means of placing White people into the subservient position Black people have been forced to occupy. And even when people of color express or practice prejudice against White people, they lack the institutional power to adversely affect the lives of White people.

• Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. " Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination ." American Economic Review , vol. 94, no. 4, Sep. 2004, pp. 991–1013, doi:10.1257/0002828042002561
• Clair, Matthew, and Jeffrey S. Denis. " Sociology of Racism ." The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences , 2015, pp. 857–863, doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.32122-5
• Pyke, Karen D. " What Is Internalized Racial Oppression and Why Don't We Study It? Acknowledging Racism's Hidden Injuries ." Sociological Perspectives , vol. 53, no. 4, Dec. 2010, pp. 551–572, doi:10.1525/sop.2010.53.4.551
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Racism: What it is, how it affects us and why it’s everyone’s job to do something about it

Bray lecturer Camara Jones addresses racism as a public health crisis

• Post author By Kathryn
• Post date October 5, 2020

By Kathryn Stroppel

In 2018, the CDC found a 16% difference in the mortality rates of Blacks versus whites across all ages and causes of death. This means that white Americans can sometimes live more than a decade longer than Blacks.  

In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the discrepancy in health outcomes has only grown. Michigan’s population, for instance, is 14% Black, yet near the start of the pandemic, African Americans made up 35% of cases and 40% of deaths.  

Because of this discrepancy in health outcomes, many scientists and government officials, including former American Public Health Association President Camara Jones, MD, PhD, MPH ; more than 50 municipalities nationwide; and a handful of legislators are attempting to root out this inequality and call it what it is: A public health crisis. 

Dr. Jones, a nationally sought-after speaker and the college’s 2020 Bray Health Leadership Lecturer, has been engaged in this work for decades and says the time to act is now.  

“The seductiveness of racism denial is so strong that if people just say a thing, six months from now they may forget why they said it. But if we start acting, we won’t forget why we’re acting,” she says. “That’s why it’s important right now to move beyond just naming something or putting out a statement making a declaration, but to actually engage in some kind of action.” 

Synergies editor Kathryn Stroppel talked with Dr. Jones about this unique time in history, her work, racism’s effects on health and well-being, and what we can all do about it. 

Let’s start with definitions. What is racism and why is important to acknowledge ‘systemic’ racism in particular? 

“Racism is a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks, which is what we call race, that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources.  

“The reason that people are using those words ‘systemic’ or ‘structural racism’ is that sometimes if you say the word racism, people think you’re talking about an individual character flaw, or a personal moral failing, when in fact racism is a system.  

“It’s not about trying to divide the room into who’s racist and who’s not. I am clear that the most profound impacts of racism happen without bias.

“The most profound impacts of racism are because structural racism has been institutionalized in our laws, customs and background norms. It does not require an identifiable perpetrator. And it most often manifests as inaction in the face of need.” 

Why did you want to give the 2020 Bray Lecture? 

“I’ve been doing this work for decades, and all of a sudden, now that we are recognizing the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, and after the murder of George Floyd and all of the other highly publicized murders that have been happening, more and more people are interested in naming racism and asking how is racism is operating here and organizing and strategizing to act. I wish I could accept every invitation.” 

What do you hope people take away from your lecture? 

“When I was president of the American Public Health Association in 2016, I launched a national campaign against racism with three tasks: To name racism; to ask, ‘how is racism operating here?’; and then to organize and strategize to act.  

“Naming racism is urgently important, especially in the context of widespread denial that racism exists. We have to say the word ‘racism’ to acknowledge that it exists, that it’s real and that it has profoundly negative impacts on the health and well-being of the nation.

“We have to be able to put together the words ‘systemic racism’ and ‘structural racism’ to able to be able to affirm that Black lives matter. That’s important and necessary, but insufficient.  

“I then equip people with tools to address how racism operates by looking at the elements of decision making, which are in our structures, policies, practices, norms and values, and the who, what, when and where of decision making, especially who’s at the table and who’s not.  

“After you have acknowledged that the problem exists, after you have some kind of understanding of what piece of it is in your wheelhouse and what lever you can pull, or who you know, you organize, strategize and collectively act.” 

You’re known for using allegory to explain racism. Why is that? 

“I use allegory because that’s how I see the world. There are two parts to it. One is that I’m observant. If I see something and if it makes me go, ‘Hmm,’ I just sort of store that away. And the second part is that I am a teacher. I’ve been telling a gardening allegory since before I started teaching at Harvard, but I later expanded that in order to help people understand how to contextualize the three levels of racism.  

“As an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, I developed its first course on race and racism. As I’m teaching students and trying to help them understand different elements, different aspects of race, racism and anti-racism, I found myself using these images naturally just to explain things, and then I recognized that allegory is sort of a superpower.  

“It makes conversations that might be otherwise difficult more accessible because we’re not talking about racism between you and me, we’re talking about these two flower pots and the pink and red seed, or we’re talking about an open or closed sign, or we’re talking about a conveyor belt or a cement factory. And so I put the image out there to suggest the ways that it can help us understand issues of race and racism. And then other people add to it or question certain parts and it becomes our collective image and our tool, not just mine.” 

What should white people in particular see as their role and responsibility in this system? 

“All of us need to recognize that racism exists, that it’s a system, that it saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources, and that we can do something about it. White people in particular have to recognize that acknowledging their privilege is important – that your very being gives you the benefit of the doubt.  

“White people who don’t want to walk around oblivious to their privilege or benefit from a racist society need to understand how to use their white privilege for the struggle.”  

“An example: About six years ago now, in McKinney, Texas, outside of Dallas, we came to know that there was a group of pre-teens who wanted to celebrate a birthday at a neighborhood swimming pool. The people who were at the pool objected to them being there and called the police. And what we saw was a white police officer dragging a young Black girl by her hair, and then he sat on her, and the young Black boys were handcuffed sitting on the curb.  

“The next day on TV, I heard a young white boy who was part of the friend group saying it was almost as if he were invisible to the police. He saw what was happening to his friends and he could have run home for safety, but instead, he recognized his white skin privilege. He stood up and videotaped all that was going on.  

“So, the thing is not to deny your white skin privilege or try to shed it, the thing is to recognize it and use it. Then as you’re using it, don’t think of yourself as an ally. Think of yourself as a compatriot in the struggle to dismantle racism. We have to recognize that if you’re white, your anti-racist struggle is not for ‘them.’ It’s for all of us.” 

Why did you transition from medicine to public health? 

“Because there’s a difference between a narrow focus on the individual and a population-based approach. I started as a family physician, but then wanted to do public health because it made me sad to fix my patients up and then send them back out into the conditions that made them sick.  

“I wanted to broaden my approach and really understand those conditions that make people sick or keep them well. From there, the data doesn’t necessarily turn into policy. So, I sort of went into the policy aspect of things. And then you recognize that you can have all the policy you want, but sometimes the policy is not enacted by politicians. So now I am considering maybe moving into politics.”  

Speaking of politics, when engaging in discussions around racism and privilege, people will sometimes try to shut down the conversation for being ‘political.’ Is racism political? 

“Racism exists. It’s foundational in our nation’s history. It continues to have profoundly negative impacts on the health and well-being of the nation. To describe what is happening is not political. If people want to deny what exists, then maybe they have political reasons for doing that.” 

What are your thoughts on COVID-19 and our country’s approach to dealing with the virus?  

“The way we’ve dealt with COVID-19 is a very medical care approach. We need to have a population view where you do random samples of people you identify as asymptomatic as well as symptomatic.  

“When you have a narrow medical approach to testing, you can document the course of the pandemic, but you can’t do anything to change it.

“With a population-based approach we already know how to stop this pandemic: It’s stay-at-home orders, mask wearing, hand washing and social distancing.

“This very seductive, narrow focus on the individual is making us scoff at public health strategies that we could put in place and is hamstringing us in terms of appropriate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“In terms of race, COVID-19 is unmasking the deep disinvestment in our communities, the historical injustices and the impact of residential segregation. This is the time to name racism as the cause of those things. The overrepresentation of people of color in poverty and white people in wealth is not happenstance.” 

We have work to do. Learn how the college is transforming academia for equity .

• Tags COVID , Public Health

Racism, bias, and discrimination

Racism is a form of prejudice that generally includes negative emotional reactions to members of a group, acceptance of negative stereotypes, and racial discrimination against individuals; in some cases it can lead to violence.

Discrimination refers to the differential treatment of different age, gender, racial, ethnic, religious, national, ability identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic, and other groups at the individual level and the institutional/structural level. Discrimination is usually the behavioral manifestation of prejudice and involves negative, hostile, and injurious treatment of members of rejected groups.

Adapted from the APA Dictionary of Psychology

Resources from APA

Racial Equity Action Plan Progress and Impact Report

Update on APA’s efforts toward dismantling systemic racism in psychology and society

Empowering youth of color

The psychologist is one of 12 global leaders who received a $20 million grant from Melinda French Gates.

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APA’s commitment to addressing systemic racism

APA’s action plan for addressing inequality

APA’s apology to people of color in the U.S.

Confronting past wrongs and building an equitable future

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Ethnic psychological associations

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• Protecting and Defending our People: Nakni tushka anowa (The Warrior’s Path) Final Report (PDF, 8.64MB) APA Division 45 Warrior’s Path Presidential Task Force (2020)
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• Talking About Race | National Museum of African American History and Culture Tools and guidance for discussions of race
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What is racism?

Definition of racism.

Racism is the process by which systems and policies, actions and attitudes create inequitable opportunities and outcomes for people based on race. Racism is more than just prejudice in thought or action. It occurs when this prejudice – whether individual or institutional – is accompanied by the power to discriminate against, oppress or limit the rights of others. 

Historical context of racism in Australia

Race and racism have been central to the organisation of Australian society since European colonisation began in 1788. As the First Peoples of Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have borne the brunt of European colonisation and have a unique experience of racism. The process of colonisation, and the beliefs that underpin it, continue to shape Australian society today.

Racism adapts and changes over time , and can impact different communities in different ways, with racism towards different groups intensifying in different historical moments . An example of this is the spike in racism towards Asian and Asian-Australian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How does racism operate?

Racism includes all the laws, policies, ideologies and barriers that prevent people from experiencing justice, dignity , and equity because of their racial identity. It can come in the form of harassment, abuse or humiliation, violence or intimidating behaviour. However, racism also exists in systems and institutions that operate in ways that lead to inequity and injustice.

The Racism. It Stops With Me website contains a list of ' Key terms ' that unpack some of the different ways that racism is expressed.

Lets Talk About Racism

Further reading

• Commit to learning to address racism in a meaningful way on the It Stops With Me website
• Understand why racism is a problem?
• Explore who experiences racism?
• Review a guide to addressing spectator racism in sports
• Watch the Kep Enderby Memorial Lecture 2023 "Racism in Sport"
• Explore human rights teaching resources relating to racism
• Understand the Australian Human Right's Commission work on Race Discrimination
• Review the Australian Human Rights Commission's Anti-Racism Framework  

More Information on Racial Discrimination

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The Fight to Redefine Racism

Sixteen years ago, in 2003, the student newspaper at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black institution in Tallahassee, published a lively column about white people. “I don’t hate whites,” the author, a senior named Ibram Rogers, wrote. “How can you hate a group of people for being who they are?” He explained that “Europeans” had been “socialized to be aggressive people,” and “raised to be racist.” His theory was that white people were fending off racial extinction, using “psychological brainwashing” and “the AIDS virus.” Perhaps the most incendiary line appeared at the end, after the author’s byline and e-mail address: “Ibram Rogers’ column will appear every Wednesday.”

As it turned out, that final claim, like a few of the claims that preceded it, was not quite accurate. The column caused a stir, and Rogers was summoned to see the editor of the local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat , where he was an intern. The editor demanded that Rogers discontinue his column, and Rogers agreed under protest, though he resolved to continue his examination of race in America, which became his life’s work. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in African-American studies from Temple, and gained a reputation in the field, along with some new names. He changed his middle name from Henry to Xolani, which is Zulu for “be peaceful,” after learning the history of Prince Henry the Navigator, a fifteenth-century Portuguese explorer who helped pioneer the African slave trade. And at his wedding, in 2013, he and his wife, Sadiqa, told their guests that they had chosen a new last name: Kendi, which means “the loved one” in the Kenyan language of Meru. In 2016, as Ibram X. Kendi, he published “ Stamped from the Beginning ,” a voluminous, sober-minded book that aimed to present “the definitive history of racist ideas in America.”

In the thirteen years since his abortive college-newspaper column, Kendi had become ever more convinced that racism, not race, was the central force in American history, and so he reached back to 1635 to show how malleable racism could be. The preachers who justified slavery used racist arguments, he wrote, but so did many of the abolitionists—the ubiquity of racism meant that no one was immune to its seductive power, including black people. In his view, the pioneering black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was propping up racist ideas in 1897, when he condemned “the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes.” So, too, was Barack Obama , when, as a Presidential candidate in 2008, he decried “the erosion of black families.” Although Obama noted that this erosion was partly due to “a lack of economic opportunity,” he also made an appeal to black self-reliance, saying that members of the African-American community needed to face “our own complicity in our condition.” Kendi saw statements like these as reflections of a persistent but delusional idea that something is wrong with black people. The only thing wrong, he maintained, was racism, and the country’s failure to confront and defeat it.

“Stamped from the Beginning” was an unreservedly militant book that received a surprisingly warm reception. Amid a series of police shootings of African-Americans during President Obama’s second term, “ Black lives matter ” became a rallying cry and then a movement, and helped push racism to the front of the progressive conversation. By the time Obama left office, in 2017, polls showed record-high support among Democrats for “special treatment” to help African-Americans, and for the idea that “racial discrimination” is the main obstacle to racial parity. A prominent cohort of writers, led by Ta-Nehisi Coates, was calling for a serious reckoning with racism, and with the way racist policies had worked to depress black earnings and constrain black life. In this climate, Kendi’s book was celebrated as a well-timed contribution to a national conversation. It won a National Book Award and transformed Kendi into a leading public intellectual. His scholarly project has been institutionalized: Kendi is now the founding director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University, in Washington, D.C.

In modern American political discourse, racism connotes hatred, and just about everyone claims to oppose it. But many on the contemporary left have pursued a more active opposition, galvanized by the rise of Donald Trump, who has been eager to denounce black politicians but reluctant to denounce white racists. In many liberal circles, a movement has gathered force: a crusade against racism and other isms. It is a fierce movement, and sometimes a frivolous one, aiming the power of its outrage at excessive prison sentences, tasteless Halloween costumes, and many offenses in between. This movement seems to have been particularly transformative among white liberals, who are now, by some measures, more concerned about racism than African-Americans are. One survey found that white people who voted for Hillary Clinton felt warmer toward black people than toward their fellow-whites.

Most white people in America are not liberals, of course, and so the campaign against racism has often taken the form of an intra-white conflict. One of the most prominent combatants is Robin DiAngelo, a white workplace-diversity trainer, available to help organizations teach their employees to be more sensitive to race. Last year, DiAngelo published “ White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism ,” a reflection on her career and her cause. “White identity is inherently racist,” she writes. “I strive to be ‘less white.’ ” She cites Kendi as an authority, even if she sometimes seems closer in spirit to Ibram Rogers, the undergraduate. But, then, Kendi himself is in an instructive mood: his new work presents itself as a how-to book, although, in a little more than two hundred absorbing pages, it’s also a manifesto and, from time to time, a memoir. It is titled “ How to Be an Antiracist ,” and in it Kendi explains how he became one, which means explaining how he used to be (as he currently sees it) a racist. Kendi is convinced that racism can be objectively identified, and therefore fought, and one day vanquished. He argues that we should stop thinking of “racist” as a pejorative, and start thinking of it as a simple description, so that we can join him in the difficult work of becoming antiracists. “One either endorses the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist or racial equality as an antiracist,” Kendi writes, adding that it isn’t possible to be simply “not racist.” He thinks that all of us must choose a side; in fact, he thinks that we are already choosing, all the time.

The modern battle against racism, as many people have observed, is driven by a kind of sacred fervor, and in “How to Be an Antiracist” Kendi makes this link explicit. “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be an antiracist,” he writes. Indeed, Christianity and antiracism were intimately connected for his parents. They were inspired by Tom Skinner, a fiery black evangelist who preached the gospel of “Jesus Christ the Radical,” and by James H. Cone, one of the originators of black-liberation theology. Kendi’s parents taught him black pride, and he took these lessons seriously. As Kendi tells it, his parents’ belief in black pride led them to embrace black self-reliance, a doctrine that urged black people to overcome the legacy of racism by working hard and doing well. Kendi bitterly recalls a speech he gave at an oratory contest in high school, decrying the bad habits of black youth. “They think it’s okay not to think,” he said. “They think it’s okay to be those who are most feared in society.” Kendi won the competition, but he now regards the speech as shamefully racist, because it blamed black people for their own failures. “I was a dupe, a chump,” he writes. He argues that the idea of black underachievement lends support for anti-black policies, which in turn help perpetuate the conditions that inspire speeches like his.

By the time he got to college, Kendi was outspokenly pro-black: he “pledged to date only Dark women,” as a personal protest against standards of beauty that favor lighter skin. His infamous newspaper column was actually a fairly mild representation of his collegiate beliefs, which included a dalliance with the notion that white people were literally aliens, and a conviction that racist whites and treacherous blacks had formed a sinister partnership—“a team of ‘them niggers’ and White folks.” But as he studied African-American history he came to believe that the basic story was even simpler than he had thought. American history, he discovered, was “a battle between racists and antiracists.”

In “Stamped from the Beginning,” Kendi divided the racists into two kinds, segregationists and assimilationists. Historically, segregationists argued that black people were inherently defective or dangerous, and needed to be kept under control. Assimilationists sounded kinder: they often fought against black oppression, but they also argued that black people needed to change their behavior—their culture—in order to catch up to white people and assimilate into white society. In 1834, the American Anti-Slavery Society issued a pamphlet of admonishment:

We have noticed with sorrow, that some of the colored people are purchasers of lottery tickets, and confess ourselves shocked to learn that some persons, who are situated to do much good, and whose example might be most salutary, engage in games of chance for money and for strong drink.

Sometimes these lectures were intended as a political strategy, on the theory that civil rights would be easier to win if black Americans were perceived to be working hard. And sometimes, especially in the twentieth century, they were intended as acknowledgments of the limits of politics. In Kendi’s view, though, talk of failures in culture or conduct supposes that black people are somehow to blame for the effects of racism—as if they could have chosen, instead, to be unaffected by it. He thinks that it is both unfair and impractical to suggest that black communities must somehow heal themselves before the government can intervene. Ranging across the centuries, “Stamped” identified segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists with a confident clarity that was also the book’s greatest weakness, because it reduced complicated lives to a series of pass-fail tests. Kendi noted with satisfaction that when Du Bois was in his sixties he concluded that black people would never “break down prejudice” through virtuous comportment—thus becoming, at last, an antiracist.

Kendi’s position has radical implications: in ruling out criticism of black culture or black behavior, it stipulates that any problems must be either fictional or the result of contemporary discrimination. If you reject “assimilationism,” then you can’t suggest, as Obama did, that centuries of racism have eroded the black nuclear family. You might try to show, instead, that black men are often shut out of the labor market, which makes them less likely to marry. Or you might conclude that the nuclear family is merely one cultural ideal among others, and not one to be universally preferred.

In the case of education, Kendi’s commitment to antiracist thinking leads him to dispute the existence of an “achievement gap” between white and black students. Black students may, on average, get lower scores on standardized tests, and drop out of high school at higher rates. But such metrics, he argues in “How to Be an Antiracist,” are themselves racist, devised to “degrade” and “exclude” black students; he suggests that a “low-testing” black student and a “high-testing” white student may simply be demonstrating “different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement.” This celebration of difference comes to an end when it is time to judge the educational systems themselves. Kendi claims that “chronic underfunding of Black schools” does create “diminished”—and not merely “different”—“opportunities for learning.” Throughout the book, the idea is to judge unfair policies, while refusing to judge, as a group, the people who are subjected to them. Kendi believes that “individual Blacks have suffered trauma” in America, but he rejects the “racist” idea that “Blacks are a traumatized people.”

In successive chapters of “How to Be an Antiracist,” Kendi explains that there are many forms of racism: there is class racism, which conflates blackness with poverty, as well as gender racism, queer racism, and something called “space racism,” which is less exciting than it sounds—it has to do with the way people associate black neighborhoods, or spaces, with violence. “ ‘Racist’ and ‘antiracist,’ ” Kendi writes, “are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment.” This suggests that people can change, as Kendi did, and as Du Bois did. But it also suggests that nonracist identity is contingent and unstable: we are all constantly peeling and resticking those nametags.

The result is to complicate the seemingly straightforward definitions Kendi offers in “How to Be an Antiracist.” For instance, he says that a policy can be either racist or antiracist; it is racist if it “produces or sustains racial inequity,” and a person is racist if he or she supports such a policy. But it may take many years to determine whether a policy produces or sustains racial inequity. For instance, some cities, including New York, generally forbid employers to ask job seekers about their criminal history, or to check their credit scores. These measures are designed in part to help African-American applicants, who may be more likely to have a criminal record, or to have poor credit. But some studies suggest that such prohibitions make black men, in general, less likely to be hired, perhaps because employers fall back on cruder generalizations. Are these laws and their supporters racist? In Kendi’s framework, the only possible answer is: wait and see.

Kendi’s definition of racism is decidedly unsentimental. If the word “racist” is capacious enough to describe both proud slaveholders and Barack Obama, and if it nevertheless must constantly be recalibrated in light of new policy research, then it may start to lose the emotional resonance that gives it power in the first place. There are a few moments in the book, though, when Kendi uses the word in a more colloquial, less rigorous sense. In the third grade, he had a white teacher who was, Kendi thought, quicker to call on white students, and quicker to punish nonwhite ones. One day, after seeing a shy black girl ignored, Kendi staged an impromptu sit-in at chapel. Years later, he says that the teacher was one of a number of “racist White people over the years who interrupted my peace with their sirens.” In a moment like this, “racist” seems less like a sticker and more like a tattoo: the word stings because it seems to convey something distasteful and profound about the person it describes. Even for the exponent of a new definition of racism, older ones are not easily banished.

It is no criticism of Kendi’s book to say that its title is misleading: he offers a provocative new way to think about race in America, but little practical advice. He wants readers to become politically active—to work to change public policy, and to “focus on power instead of people.” DiAngelo, the author of “White Fragility,” is unapologetically interested in people, particularly white people. She is perhaps the country’s most visible expert in anti-bias training, a practice that is also an industry, and from all appearances a prospering one. (Last year, anti-bias training was in the headlines when Starbucks closed its American stores for a day to conduct a company-wide lesson in “racial bias and discrimination.”) DiAngelo has been helping to lead workplace seminars since the nineties, and she has encountered some resistance. “When we try to talk openly and honestly about race,” she writes, “we are so often met with silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback.” To explain this phenomenon, she coined the phrase “white fragility.”

DiAngelo holds a Ph.D. in multicultural education, but her most important credential is all the time she has spent in conference rooms. Where Kendi insists that racism can cloud anyone’s judgment, DiAngelo sees white people as singularly responsible. “Only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color,” she writes. She is unimpressed by white participants who swear they “treat everyone the same,” since that’s not possible. And she is alert to acts of racial transgression, as when a white woman uses what DiAngelo considers a “stereotypical” voice while telling an anecdote about an African-American. She thanks the woman for her “insight,” and then asks her to “consider not telling that story in that way again.” When the woman tries to defend herself, DiAngelo interrupts, speaking in the friendly but steely voice of administrative authority. “I am offering you a teachable moment,” she says.

Despite her sensitivity to racial power dynamics and to the reality of racial harassment, DiAngelo seems to have little interest in other workplace power dynamics, which might explain why she’s so surprised that many of the employees who attend her sessions aren’t happier to see her. DiAngelo is devoted to “challenging injustice,” but her corporate clients doubtless have their own priorities, and in any case it’s not clear what the effect of these seminars is. A group of social scientists has come up with the concept of “implicit bias,” which many trainers aim to diagnose and treat, even though there is scant evidence that implicit bias reliably affects behavior. DiAngelo mentions implicit bias, but, even more than Kendi, she is engaged in something that resembles a spiritual practice. In the sanctuaries she creates, one of the rules is that white people, especially white women, should not cry. It attracts too much attention, and it may upset nonwhite participants, by evoking the “long historical backdrop of black men being tortured and murdered because of a white woman’s distress.” If DiAngelo herself can’t resist, she performs a ritual of abnegation. “I try to cry quietly so that I don’t take up more space,” she writes, “and if people rush to comfort me, I do not accept the comfort.”

If there is scripture in DiAngelo’s world, it is the testimony of “people of color,” a term that usefully reduces all of humanity to two categories: white and other. Since white people are presumed to have “institutional power,” and therefore institutional responsibility, people of color function in this world as sages, speaking truths that white people must cherish, and not challenge. DiAngelo has sometimes received “feedback from people of color on my racist patterns and assumptions,” which she first found uncomfortable but eventually, as she grew more enlightened, came to find encouraging. “There is no way for me to avoid enacting problematic patterns,” DiAngelo writes, “so if a person of color trusts me enough to take the risk and tell me, then I am doing well.”

Once, when she offended a black client by referring to another black woman’s hair, DiAngelo discussed the incident with another white person (so as not to burden any other people of color), and then apologized to the offended party. She was forgiven her trespasses, but says she was prepared not to be. When you get feedback, especially from a person of color, what’s most important is to be grateful, and to try to do better. “Racism is complex,” she writes, “and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback.”

Unlike Kendi, who boldly defines racism, DiAngelo is endlessly deferential—for her, racism is basically whatever any person of color thinks it is. In the story she tells about the world, she and her fellow white people have all the power, and therefore all the responsibility to do the gruelling but transformative spiritual work she calls for. The story makes white people seem like flawed, complicated characters; by comparison, people of color seem good, wise, and perhaps rather simple. This narrative may be appealing to its target audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer much to anyone else. At least, that’s my interpretation, and perhaps DiAngelo will be grateful to hear it. After all, I am what she would call a person of color, and whatever I write surely counts as “feedback.” Maybe that means she is, indeed, doing well.

Part of what makes DiAngelo’s project surreal is the difference in scale between the historical injustices she invokes and the contemporary slights she addresses: on one side, the indescribable horror of lynching; on the other, careless crying. Kendi is less concerned about manners, and he strives to stay grounded in the brute facts of racial oppression. But his latest book, too, grows surreal at times, as he tries to reconcile the reality of black life in America with his own refusal to generalize.

“To be an antiracist is to realize there is no such thing as Black behavior,” he writes. He did not always grasp this. As a boy in Queens, Kendi found his life shaped by a fear of victimization. “I avoided making eye contact, as if my classmates were wolves,” he writes. “I avoided stepping on new sneakers like they were land mines.” In South Jamaica, his neighborhood, there was a local bully named Smurf, who pulled a gun on Kendi, and once, with Kendi watching, beat a boy unconscious on a city bus in order to steal his Walkman. This sounds terrifying, but Kendi now claims that his fears were delusional. “I believed violence was stalking me,” he writes, “but in truth I was being stalked inside my own head by racist ideas.” He thinks that prominent African-Americans can be unduly influenced by their rough childhoods. “We don’t write about all those days we were not faced with guns in our ribs,” he writes, at which point his antiracist project sounds less like a form of truthtelling and more like a kind of propaganda.

Crime poses a conceptual problem for Kendi. As most people know, African-Americans are greatly overrepresented among both victims and perpetrators of violent crime in America—indeed, this fact provides stark evidence of the country’s stubborn racial inequality. But Kendi’s approach disallows talk of criminality as a particular “problem” in black neighborhoods; he suggests that white neighborhoods have their own dangers, including crooked bankers (they “might steal your life savings”) and suburban traffic accidents; he even insists that there are a “disproportionate number of White males who engage in mass shootings,” although mass shootings account for a tiny percentage of gun deaths, and white people are not disproportionately likely to commit them. By the end of the section, the bully named Smurf seems less like a real person and more like a spectre: the personification of old racist ideas, come to life in the imagination of a fretful future scholar in Queens.

As it happens, there actually is a notorious tough guy named Smurf who grew up in Kendi’s neighborhood around the same time. He came to be known as Bang ’Em Smurf, a sometime rapper who, during the two-thousands, was an ally turned antagonist of 50 Cent, the hip-hop star. Not long ago, Bang ’Em Smurf self-published a memoir-cum-manifesto of his own, a seemingly unedited collection of fragments that provides a glimpse of the world that Kendi writes about. Smurf is evidently happy to think of himself as one of the “wolves” who roamed the neighborhood: his book is called “Wisdom of a Wolf,” and in it he recounts how he started stealing after his own bicycle was stolen, and explains the formative effect of seeing his mother stabbed when he was four or five. (According to Smurf, she fought back and won the fight.)

Smurf doesn’t mention a bookish militant named Ibram, but he does offer his own assessment of the neighborhood: “Where we are from Jamaica Queens the average youth doesn’t have hope or inspiration to live.” Smurf no longer lives there: in 2004, he was convicted of illegal-weapon possession, and after serving his sentence he was deported to Trinidad and Tobago, where he was born. But he is sure that things have grown only more difficult for young people in neighborhoods like Jamaica. Unlike Kendi, Smurf thinks that something is wrong there. “Most of these youth come from poverty,” he writes. “There is Lack of love and discipline in the household.” Smurf thinks that these families could and should do better, which means that, by Kendi’s definition, he is an assimilationist—and probably a space racist, too.

Kendi thinks that calls for racial uplift are doomed to failure, because they can never change enough minds, black or white, to alter either behavior or policy. They are prayer disguised as politics. But his approach demands a fair amount of faith, too, given that it requires a great part of the country to undergo a revolution in thought that took Kendi decades of study to achieve. Where DiAngelo says she is not sure that the country is making any progress toward reducing racism, Kendi thinks an antiracist world is possible. “Racism is not even six hundred years old,” he writes, tracing its origin to the fifteenth-century explorations of his former namesake Prince Henry. “It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early.” But the cure, he thinks, will start with policies, not ideas. He suggests that, just as ideologies of racial difference emerged after the slave trade in order to justify it, antiracist ideologies will emerge once we are bold enough to enact an antiracist agenda: criminal-justice reform, more money for black schools and black teachers, a program to fight residential segregation.

“Once they clearly benefit,” Kendi writes, “most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.” This is an inspiring prediction, although Kendi’s own scholarship provides less reason for optimism. But, if he is right, becoming an antiracist might entail a realization that our national conversation about race is largely beside the point. If it is possible, as Kendi insists, to change “racist policy” without first changing “racist minds,” then perhaps we needn’t worry quite so much about who thinks what, and why. Kendi wants us to see not only that there is nothing wrong with black people but that there is likewise nothing wrong with white people. “There is nothing right or wrong with any racial groups,” he writes. This is the bittersweet message hidden in his book: that, in the grand racial drama of America, every group is already doing the best it can. ♦

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Racial Discrimination — The Impact of Racism on the Society

Racism in Society, Its Effects and Ways to Overcome

• Categories: Racial Discrimination

About this sample

Words: 2796 |

14 min read

Published: Jun 10, 2020

Words: 2796 | Pages: 6 | 14 min read

Table of contents

Executive summary, the effects of racism in today’s world (essay), works cited.

• The current platform of social media has given many of the minorities their voice; they can make sure that the world can hear them and their opinions are made clear. This phenomenon is only going to rise with the rise of social media in the coming years.
• The diversity of race, culture and ethnicity that has been seen as a cause of rift and disrupt in the society in the past, will act as a catalyst for social development sooner rather than later, with the decrease in racism.
• Racist view of an individual are not inherited, they are learned. With that in mind, it is fair to assume that the coming generations will not be as critical of an individual’s race as the older generations have been.
• If people dismiss the concept of racial/ethnical evaluations and instead, evaluate an individual on one’s abilities and capabilities, the economic development will definitely have a rise.
• A lot of intra-society grievances and mishaps that are caused due to misconceptions of an ethnic group can be reduced as social interaction increases.
• As people from different ethnic backgrounds, coming from humble beginnings, discriminated throughout their careers, manage to emerge successful to the public platform, the racist train of thought is being exposed and will continue to do so. This will inspire people from any and every background, race, language, ethnicity to step forward and compete on the large scale.
• Racism and prejudice are at the root of racial profiling and that racial bias has been interweaved into the culture of most societies. However, these chains have grown much weaker as time has passed, to the point that they are in a fragile state.
• Another ray of hope that can be witnessed nowadays that people are no longer ashamed of their cultural identity. People now believe that their cultural background is in no way or form inferior to another and thus, worth defending. This will turn out to be a major factor in minimizing racism in the future.
• Because of the strong activism against racism, a new phenomenon has emerged that is color blindness, which is the complete disregard of racial characteristics in any kind of social situation.
• The world is definitely going in the right direction concerning the curse that is Racism; however, it is far too early to claim that humankind will completely rid itself of this vile malignance. PrescriptionsRacism is a curse that has plagued humanity since long. It has been responsible for multitudes of nefarious acts in the past and is causing a lot of harm even now, therefore care must be taken that this problem is brought under control as soon as possible so as not to hinder the growth of human societies. The following are some of the precautions, so to say, that will help tremendously in tackling this problem.
• The first and foremost step is to take this problem seriously both on an individual and on community level. Racism is something that can not be termed as a minor issue and dismissed. History books dictate that racism is responsible for countless deaths and will continue to claim the lives of more innocents unless it is brought under control with a firm hand. The first step to controlling it is to accept racism as a serious problem.
• Another problem is that many misconceptions or rumors that are dismissed by most people as a trivial detail are sometimes a big deal for other people, which might push them over the edge to commit a crime or some other injustice. So whenever there is an anomaly, a misconception or a misrepresentation of an individual’s, a group’s or a society’s ideas or beliefs, try to be the voice of reason rather than staying quiet about it. Decades of staying silent over crucial issues has caused us much harm and brought us to this point, staying silent now can only lead us to annihilation.
• One of most radical and effective solution to racial diversity is to turn it from something negative to something positive. Where previously, one does not talk to someone because of his or her cultural differences, now talk to them exactly because of that. If different cultures and races start taking steps, baby steps even, towards the goal of acquiring mutual respect and trust, racism can be held in check.
• On the national level, contingencies can be introduced and laws can be made that support cultural diversity and preach against anything that puts it in harm’s way. Taking such measures will make every single member of the society well aware of the scale of this problem and people will take it more seriously rather than ridiculing it.
• Finally, just as being racist was a part of the culture in the older generations, we need to make being anti-racist a part of our cultures. If our children, our youth grew up watching their elders and their role models dissing and undermining racism at every point of life, they will definitely adopt a lifestyle that will allow no racial discriminations in their life.

Methodology

Findings and results.

• Is racism justifiable?
• Is the current trend of racism increasing in your country?
• Do you have any acquaintances or friends that belong to a different ethnical background?
• Would you ever use someone’s race against them to win an argument?
• Would you agree to work in a diverse racial environment?
• Will humankind ever rid itself of racism?
• Have you ever taken any measures to abate racism?
• Racism has changed the relationship between people?
• Racial discriminations are apparent in our everyday life.
• One racial/ethnic group can be superior to another
• Racial/ethnic factors can change your perception of a person.
• Racial diversity can cause problems in one’s society.
• Racial or Ethnical conflict should be in cooperated into the laws of one’s society.
• Are you satisfied with the way different ethnic groups are treated in your society?
• ABC News. (2021). The legacy of racism in America. https://abcnews.go.com/US/legacy-racism-america/story?id=77223885
• British Broadcasting Corporation. (2021). Racism: What is it? https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/53498245
• Chetty, R., Hendren, N., & Jones, M. R. (2020). Racism and the American economy. Harvard University.
• Gibson, K. L., & Oberg, K. (2019). What does racism look like today? National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/04/what-does-racism-look-like-today-feature/
• Hughey, M. W. (2021). White supremacy. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology.
• Jones, M. T., & Janson, C. (2020). Racism and health: Evidence and needed research. Annual Review of Public Health, 41, 1-16.
• Krieger, N. (2019). Discrimination and racial inequities in health : A commentary and a research agenda. American Journal of Public Health, 109(S1), S82-S85.
• Kteily, N., Bruneau, E., Waytz, A., & Cotterill, S. (2021). The psychology of racism: A review of theory and research. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 479-514.
• Schmitt, M. T., Branscombe, N. R., Postmes, T., & Garcia, A. (2014). The consequences of perceived discrimination for psychological well-being: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), 921-948.
• Williams, D. R., & Mohammed, S. A. (2013). Racism and health I: Pathways and scientific evidence. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(8), 1152-1173.

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10 Root Causes of Racism

According to Merriam-Webster , “racism” is the belief that a person’s race is a “fundamental determinant” of their traits and abilities. In the real world, this has led to persistent and insidious beliefs about superior and inferior races. Racism is also the “systemic oppression” of a racial group, giving other groups a social, economic, and political advantage. Both definitions matter in this article, which addresses ten root causes of racism (specifically against Black people) on a systemic and individual level.

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Cause #1: Greed and self-interest

Many experts believe racist beliefs were developed to justify self-interest and greed. For almost 400 years, European investors enslaved people through the Transatlantic slave trade to support the massive tobacco, sugar, and cotton industries in the Americas. Slavery was cheaper than indentured servitude, so slavery was a business decision, not a reflection of hatred or bigotry.

Chesapeake , which grew tobacco, provides a good example. For a while, land owners used indentured servants, most of whom were young men who signed a 4-7 year contract. Servants were exploited during their contract, but after their time was over, they were free. The first Africans , some of whom worked as indentured servants, likely arrived in 1619. However, by the 1660s, the number of indentured servants from Europe dwindled, so tobacco plantation owners began to rely on slavery to raise profits. What could justify the ownership of other humans? Defenders of slavery had a list of racist reasons , saying that slavery was part of God’s plan, it “civilized” Black people, and that some races were so inferior they were meant to be slaves. As Preston Tisdale wrote in an opinion piece for CTPost, “the demonization and dehumanization of African Americans needed to be powerful enough to obfuscate the horrors of slavery.” Racism has certainly proved powerful.

Cause #2: Scientific racism

While many say ignorance sparks racism, some of history’s most intelligent minds were behind racist ideas. Around the end of the 18th century, science replaced religion and superstition as the intellectual authority. In the way scientists started categorizing animals and plants, they also started categorizing humans. In 1776, German scientist Johann Fredrich Blumenbach classified humans into five groups, putting “Caucasian,” or “the white race” at the top. In the mid-1800s, Samuel George Morton posited that brain size was linked to intelligence. He concluded that white people had larger skulls and were therefore intellectually superior. While scientific texts were not widely available in this era, Morton’s ideas managed to spread in accessible publications, like cheap periodicals.

Scientific racism only grew stronger as the years went by. The Nazis relied heavily on classifications, eugenics, and other racist junk science when justifying their genocide. While no longer held in high regard, scientific racism continues to this day thanks to groups like the Pioneer Fund , which supports publications writing about race-based differences in intelligence.

Cause #3: Discriminatory policies

Policies that discriminate by race reinforce racist beliefs. It sends a message to society that certain people, simply because of their race, don’t deserve the same treatment or opportunities as everyone else. Governments use a variety of justifications, such as natural security or public health, that many won’t ever question. It rarely matters if those justifications are at all based in reality.

Housing laws are a prime example of this. In the United States, regulations kept Black people from owning houses in certain neighborhoods for decades, relegating them to lower-quality housing and preventing them from accumulating wealth. This process of providing housing to white, middle-class, and lower-middle-class families while excluding Black Americans and other Americans of color is known as “red-lining.” The Federal Housing Administration believed if Black Americans bought homes in or near suburbs, the property values would drop. The FHA had no facts to back up this belief. Red-lining had consequences that resonate to this day, including but not limited to a gap in generational wealth and racist beliefs about Black people.

Cause #4: Representation in media

How the media represents people of different races in books, TV, movies, and music has a big impact on how society views race. While the media reflects cultural views, it also shapes culture and implants racist beliefs into young people and those new to a country. As an example, on a 2020 panel about the media’s influence on views about racism, a UNLV graduate student studying social work and journalism discussed how new immigrants are often first introduced to Black people as either criminals or police abuse victims. This negative media representation can convince immigrants they should stay away from Black people if they want to be safe.

Racism in the media is not always malicious, but it has incredibly negative effects regardless of intent. As an example, Black people are over-represented in media stories about poverty and welfare. This affects Black people’s view of themselves as well as society’s perception of Black people.

Cause #5: A desire to “keep the peace”

Racism often persists because “keeping the peace” or maintaining law and order is more important than change. In his book Stamped from the Beginning , Ibram X. Kendi writes that racist ideas in America have long suppressed resistance to racial inequalities. When people believe racist things – like that Black people are naturally more violent and dangerous – they aren’t disturbed by police brutality or mass incarceration. They believe it’s justified.

Even people who (supposedly) disagree with racist ideas can become focused on “keeping the peace” when real change requires troubling the waters. In a 1963 statement , eight Alabama clergymen called protests against racial injustice “unwise and untimely.” They asked the Black community to withdraw support from the demonstrations and “unite locally in working peacefully.” Dr. King responded in the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which includes a piercing criticism of the “white moderate,” who King describes as “more devoted to order than to justice” and who prefers a “negative peace, which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.”

Cause #6: “Good” people who don’t challenge racism

Racist ideas flourish when “good” people refuse to talk about them. While many people don’t agree with racism, they fail to confront it head-on, which makes them ill-equipped to recognize all the forms of racism. This problem has a long history in the United States. White abolitionists may have fought to abolish slavery, but they did not go after the laws and beliefs that kept Black people from being full, equal citizens in America. Many even ended up contributing to racism as they still saw Black people as inferior, though not so inhuman as to deserve slavery. The North , which liked to see itself as progressive compared to the South, was home to numerous hate crimes.

Cause #7. Failing to recognize racism in oneself

In places like the United States, people aren’t good at recognizing racism in themselves. There are a few reasons, including the country’s failure to reckon with its racist legacy and the persistent myth that being “colorblind” is the best way to end racism. Many well-meaning people think if they just “love everyone” and ignore race, they can never be racist. They often fall into the trap that as long as they aren’t wearing a white hood or using racial slurs, they’re in the clear. However, believing in platitudes like “I don’t see race” or “All lives matter” ignores history and pretends that the US has overcome all its problems regarding race.

Cause #8: Community ties

For individuals, finding community with people who share the same beliefs about race can strengthen racist thinking. As an example, if someone grows up surrounded by racist family members or friends, they’ll likely share those beliefs. They’ll repeat racist jokes, believe the same stereotypes, and seek out others who agree with them. Even if they begin to doubt their old views or experience the negative effects of their racism, community ties and fear of isolation can keep people from changing their minds.

Stepping outside an echo chamber can help. In a study that examined data from 46 countries, researchers found that those who live in more diverse places have a stronger sense of commonality (they see themselves as more similar to each other than different) than those who live in less diverse places. There are also organizations like Life After Hate that help former extremists live happier, healthier lives.

Cause #9: Quick, unconscious judgments

People are quick to judge others based on their appearance, clothing, how they talk, and other physical traits. This isn’t something necessarily shameful as humans are wired to make fast judgments on our surroundings so we can stay safe. Our brains also use judgments as “shortcuts,” because it’s very difficult to gather a ton of information before making a decision. However, humans aren’t making judgments in a vacuum. Things like unconscious bias, our upbringings, the kind of media we consume, and more all factor into what we think of others.

Thanks to the persistence of racist beliefs in most societies, it’s easy to categorize entire groups of people as “lazy,” “violent,” “loud,” and so on. Sometimes, the generalizations aren’t necessarily negative, like how Asian people in the US are frequently stereotyped as “smart.” However, any generalizations based on race are harmful. When not challenged, these lightning-fast judgments have a significant impact on how people are treated and the kinds of opportunities they get.

Cause #10: Scapegoating

Society always looks for a scapegoat when things aren’t going well and when people experience personal struggles, they may blame others rather than themselves. Historically, racial (and often religious) minorities get blamed. As an example, when someone gets passed up for a job opportunity, they may say something like, “It’s because I’m white. The minorities always get the jobs.” Scapegoating can lead to violence. “The Great Replacement Theory” is a big example. This racist belief claims that non-European immigrants are “replacing” white people around the world. A handful of mass shootings – like the ones in Christchurch, New Zealand; El Paso, Texas; Buffalo, New York – were carried out by men who believed in the theory.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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Racism Essay | Essay on Racism for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Racism Essay: Racism can be defined as the belief that individual races of people have distinctive cultural features that are determined by the hereditary factors and hence make some races inherently superior to the others. The idea that one race has natural superiority than the others created abusive behaviour towards the members of other races. Racism, like discrimination towards women, is a form of discrimination and prejudice.

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Long and Short Essays on Racism for Students and Kids in English

We are providing children and students with essay samples on an extended essay of 500 words and a short piece of 150 words on the topic “Racism” for reference.

Long Essay on Racism 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Racism is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Racism is the illogical belief that a particular race has distinctive cultural traits endowed due to the genetic factors that make individual races inherently superior to the others and give them the right to exploit the inferior races. When we openly state the meaning of racism, we can see how inexplicable and unimaginable, such a thought is. But, racism is so deep-seated in our consciousness and subconsciousness that we have long bowed down to such infuriating ideals.

Such instances of subtle racism within a society are rampant and lead to inexcusable behaviour of people towards others. Such unjustifiable behaviour and actions are things like mental stress, social harassment, and even physical assaults. Since we have let racist comments and activities unnoticed, it is left untreated and leads to more division and anger between the two different people of different backgrounds. It is a never-ending, vicious cycle and a massive crisis in today’s world.

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We should never judge others for the way they look for the way they speak. All people are born equal, and nothing can change that. Narrow-minded thoughts like racism should have extinguished with the increase in educated people and the intermixing of various races. Still, sadly, such behaviour is the blatant reality and shows no signs of toning down.

Racism makes people feel sorry for being born a certain way, of having a particular skin colour. Racism has no scientific explanation, and the racist people are entirely ignorant about the feelings of other human beings.

No one can choose to be black, white, dark, fair, or anything in particular. God has made us, and there is nothing that should make us feel guilty for that. It is ridiculous and inhumane to make fun of people due to their cultural background or colour of skin.

We keep talking about how modern society embraces diverse cultures and diverse people. We try to accomplish gigantic things like World Peace, eradicate hunger and poverty, but we are not ready to unite to make such changes happen.

Racism is a barrier between the social advancement of our society. It is impossible to achieve something great with such narrow-minded and exclusive ideals. It is a delicate topic and requires people to have an open mind and embrace the changes.

It is possible to eradicate racism in our society if we are more open about such sensitive topics and give simple matters like this a thought. Most of us are way too self-centred to think about such obstacles. It is so commonplace a behaviour that we forget its adverse effects. It is high time we made a change.

Since racism is such a deep-seated belief, we will need some time to change. But, we can achieve anything if we put our mind to it. We do not need racism to divide us. People should acknowledge the fact that to achieve anything significant. We need to let go of narrow-minded beliefs. Only then can we advance as a society of the world.

Short Essay on Racism 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Racism is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Racism is the prejudiced belief of people that a particular race is superior to others. The idea has resulted from years of neglection and oppression on some races for their traits and skin colour. Racism is a critical social barrier, which prevents our society from advancing.

Racism is a type of discrimination which makes the recipient feel bad about where they were born and how they look. It is an unscientific method of judging people.

Racism is so deep-seated in our culture that we think it to be the norm. The need to eradicate racism has come to highlight after a series of violent activities against people for their race.

We, as a society, need to let go of this narrow-minded thought that some people are inferior to others only because of what their skin colour is. Racism can only be removed by spreading awareness and correcting people when they make a racist comment. Together, we can fight against racism. Let us unite and eradicate racism once and for all.

10 Lines on Racism Essay in English

1. Racism is the wrong belief that some people are better and superior to others due to their genetic trait corresponding to their skin colour and race. 2. It refers to the thought that inherent physical appearance has a link with personality and intelligence. 3. Many corrupt people use racism as an excuse to justify horrific behaviour towards others. 4. The beginning of racism is somewhat unclear but might have originated when migration began. 5. People think that passing casual comments that link people’s work with their ethnicity is a joke. 6. Racism comes in several forms like symbolic, ideological, structural, interactional, etc. 7. Ideas and assumptions about racial categories dictate the behaviour of some people towards others. 8. Racism is a baseless and unscientific method of judging people. 9. Racism is a discriminatory process of thinking which is unacceptable. 10. We must correct people and not let casual racist comments pass when we hear them.

FAQ’s on Racism Essay

Question 1. What is racism?

Answer: Racism is hate towards people simply because of their differences. It is the enemy of freedom and should be washed away from society. Racism continues to grow alongside the technological advancements and education.

Question 2. Why do people pass racist comments?

Answer: Many people are unaware of their discriminatory behaviour towards their neighbours or peers due to apparent differences in their race. We have become so used to facing racism that we deem it as normal behaviour and let go of it.

Question 3. Why should we try to wipe out racism?

Answer: Racism is the barrier between the modernization of our society. There is no place for such unjustifiable behaviour in our community.

Question 4. What are the types of racism?

Answer: There are seven forms of racism. Some of them are symbolic, ideological, discursive, interactional, institutional, structural, and systemic racism.

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Structural racism: what it is and how it works

Professor of Race and Education and Director of the Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality in the Carnegie School of Education, Leeds Beckett University

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From the moment it was published, the UK’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities’ report was met with a media storm driven by both its supporters and detractors. Months later, amid continued division over the report’s position that racism isn’t pronounced in the UK, there’s still some confusion about what exactly some of the report’s buzzwords mean.

The terms “structural racism” and “institutional racism” are among many of the concepts that have been mentioned in relation to the report’s position on whether or not racism is ingrained in the UK.

But assessing the truth behind the Commission’s suggestion that these forms of racism aren’t factors in driving racial inequality first requires decoding these terms.

Structural and institutional racism

Defined initially by political activists Stokely Carmichael and Charles Vernon Hamilton in 1967, the concept of institutional racism came into the public sphere in 1999 through the Macpherson Inquiry into the racist murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

Institutional racism is defined as: “processes, attitudes and behaviour(s) which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people”.

As Sir William Macpherson, head of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, wrote at the time, it “persists because of the failure … to recognise and address its existence and causes by policy, example and leadership”.

Institutional and structural racism work hand in glove. Institutional racism relates to, for example, the institutions of education, criminal justice and health. Examples of institutional racism can include: actions (or inaction) within organisations such as the Home Office and the Windrush Scandal ; a school’s hair policy ; institutional processes such as stop and search, which discriminate against certain groups.

Structural racism refers to wider political and social disadvantages within society, such as higher rates of poverty for Black and Pakistani groups or high rates of death from COVID-19 among people of colour .

In plain terms, structural racism shapes and affects the lives, wellbeing and life chances of people of colour. It normalises historical, cultural and institutional practices that benefit white people and disadvantage people of colour. It also stealthily replicates the racial hierarchy established more than 400 years ago through slavery and colonialism, placing white people at the top and Black people at the bottom.

Read more: Learning about white privilege isn't harmful to white working class children – viewpoint

Structural racism is enforced through institutional systems like seemingly neutral recruitment policies, which lead to the exclusion of people of colour from organisations, positions of power and social prominence. It exists because of white supremacy : a pattern of beliefs, assumptions and behaviours which advance the interests of white people and influences decision-making to maintain their dominance.

White supremacy lies at the heart of how systems in society work. It’s the main reason behind inequalities such as the ethnic pay gap across many institutions, as well as fewer judges and university vice chancellors of colour.

How does structural racism work?

Structural racism exists in the social, economic, educational, and political systems in society. Many of the issues that come with it have been escalated by the pandemic, including the disproportionate deaths of people of colour from COVID-19.

These challenges have worsened because of existing structural racial inequalities which mean that Black and Pakistani communities are more likely to work in unskilled jobs . As a result, many have had to work through the pandemic as key workers, increasing their exposure and susceptibility to catching or dying from the virus.

In fact, large numbers of health workers of colour reported being too afraid to complain about the issues they faced, with some being “bullied and shamed” into seeing patients, despite having no PPE. Their exposure to these inequalities can’t be blamed on pessimism or class or culture, but the structures within which they worked.

Structural and institutional racism account for under-representation in many fields. These barriers are responsible for everything from the 4.9% ethnic pay gap between white medical consultants and medical consultants of colour, a lack of teachers of colour in schools , the 1% of Black professors in universities and the absence of medical training about skin conditions and how they present on black and brown skin. The examples are endless.

It would be easy to blame the people affected, but that would ignore how structural racism works. Black people, for example, can work exceptionally hard but still encounter significant barriers that can be directly traced to issues of structural racism.

It’s also tempting to believe that the success of a small selection of people of colour means that the same opportunities are available to all. The suggestion being that these gains are evidence of a meritocracy (the idea that people can gain power or success through hard work alone). But this ignores the invisible hurdles that on average make the likelihood of achievement for various communities of colour much slimmer than for white people.

Critical Race Theory (a concept devised by US legal scholars which explains that racism is so endemic in society that it can feel non-existent to those who aren’t targets of it) also debunks the idea that we live in a meritocracy . It describes meritocracy as a liberal construct designed to conceal the barriers which impede success for people of colour.

If structural and institutional racism can’t be explained away by the idea that people of colour simply don’t work hard enough, or are “overly pessimistic” about race, it’s apparent that society needs alternative solutions. One of which is accepting not only that racism exists, but that it’s much more far-reaching than it seems to white people. We can’t eradicate these forms of racism without courage, commitment and concerted efforts from those in positions of power, which in the UK especially includes action from the white majority.

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An Essay for Teachers Who Understand Racism Is Real

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This essay is not to enumerate the recent murders of Black people by police, justify why protest and uprising are important for social change, or remind us why NFL player Colin Kaepernick took a knee. If you have missed those points, blamed victims, or proclaimed “All Lives Matter,” this article is not for you, and you may want to ask yourself whether you should be teaching any children, especially Black children.

This article is for teachers who understand that racism is real, anti-Blackness is real, and state-sanctioned violence, which allows police to kill Black people with impunity, is real. It is for teachers who know change is necessary and want to understand exactly what kind of change we need as a country.

Politicians who know the words “justice” and “equity” only when they want peace in the streets are going to try to persuade us that they are capable of reforming centuries of oppression by changing policies, adding more accountability measures, and removing the “bad apples” from among police.

More From This Author:

“Teachers, We Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were” “White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy” “How Schools Are ‘Spirit Murdering’ Black and Brown Students” “Dear White Teachers: You Can’t Love Your Black Students If You Don’t Know Them” “‘Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black”

These actions will sound comprehensive and, with time, a solution to injustice. These reforms may even reduce police killings or school suspensions of Black students, but as civil rights activist Ella Baker said, a “reduction of injustice is not the same as freedom.” Reformists want incremental change, but Black lives are being lost with every day we wait. And to be Black is to live in a constant state of exhaustion.

Centuries of Black resistance and protest have had a profound impact on the nation. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of “The 1619 Project,” points out, “We have helped the country to live up to its founding ideals. ... Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different—it might not be a democracy at all.” Those civil rights achievements were critical, including the reformist ones.

But reform is no longer enough. Too often, reform is rooted in Whiteness because it appeases White liberals who need to see change but want to maintain their status, power, and supremacy.

Abolition of oppression is needed because reform still did not stop a police officer from putting his knee on George Floyd’s neck in broad daylight for 8 minutes and 46 seconds; it did not stop police from killing Breonna Taylor in her own home. Also that: Largely non-White school districts get $23 billion less in state and local funding than predominantly White ones; Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 26 percent of the deaths from COVID-19; and with only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population. We need to be honest: We cannot reform something this monstrous; we have to abolish it.

Abolitionist Resources From Bettina L. Love

Organizations

• Free Minds, Free People
• Critical Resistance
• Black Youth Project 100
• Quetzal Education Consulting
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• Black Organizing Project
• Teachers 4 Social Justice
• “Reading Towards Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness”

Abolitionists want to eliminate what is oppressive, not reform it, not reimagine it, but remove oppression by its roots. Abolitionists want to understand the conditions that normalize oppression and uproot those conditions, too. Abolitionists, in the words of scholar and activist Bill Ayers, “demand the impossible” and work to build a world rooted in the possibilities of justice. Abolitionists are not anarchists because, as we eliminate these systems, we want to build conditions that create institutions that are just, loving, equitable, and center Black lives.

Abolitionism is not a social-justice trend. It is a way of life defined by commitment to working toward a humanity where no one is disposable, prisons no longer exist, being Black is not a crime, teachers have high expectations for Black and Brown children, and joy is seen as a foundation of learning.

Abolitionists strive for that reality by fighting for a divestment of law enforcement to redistribute funds to education, housing, jobs, and health care; elimination of high-stakes testing; replacement of watered-down and Eurocentric materials from educational publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with community-created standards and curriculum; the end of police presence in schools; employment of Black teachers en masse; hiring of therapists and counselors who believe Black lives matter in schools; destruction of inner-city schools that resemble prisons; and elimination of suspension in favor of restorative justice.

Abolitionist work is hard and demands an indomitable spirit of resistance. As a nation, we saw this spirit in Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. We also see it in 21st-century abolitionists like Angela Davis, Charlene Carruthers, Erica Meiners, Derecka Purnell, David Stovall, and Farima Pour-Khorshid.

For non-Black people, abolitionism requires giving up the idea of being an “ally” to become a “co-conspirator.” Many social-justice groups have shifted the language to “co-conspirator” because allies work toward something that is mutually beneficial and supportive to all parties. Co-conspirators, in contrast, understand how Whiteness and privilege work in our society and leverage their power, privilege, and resources in solidarity with justice movements to dismantle White supremacy. Co-conspirators function as verbs, not as nouns.

The journey for abolitionists and our co-conspirators is arduous, but we fight for a future that will never need to be reformed again because it was built as just from the beginning.

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In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this essay, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Here’s what she had to say:

A version of this article appeared in the June 17, 2020 edition of Education Week as For Teachers Who Understand Racism Is Real

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What is Racism: a Definition and Examples

Serving as an introductory piece, this essay seeks to define the concept of racism in clear terms. Beyond a mere definition, it incorporates real-world examples to illustrate the various manifestations and impacts of racism across different contexts. PapersOwl showcases more free essays that are examples of Critical Theory topic.

How it works

What is racism? Racism is discrimination and/or being prejudice against another race. My paper is going to inform you on events on racism that have affected us humans throughout history. There has been so many events based on racism that are still on going to this day. I will give you my personal thoughts on how I feel about racism.

Racism and prejudice has been around for centuries and is still very popular today. My topic is mainly focused on racism towards african american culture.

They have suffered racism the most and are still battling against racism. An example of racism is Tupac Shakur, one of the most famous and successful artist in his time and still to this day, and has always influenced people with his music. He rapped about his struggles in life with racism, he reflects on his music to let people know and understand what he goes through with racism and sends out messages on his personal reflection of the racist world we live in.

There has been a lot of struggles with racism. Many old rappers from the 1980s have rapped about their struggles. Most of their racism struggles were police brutality. Racism was very popular in those times. They used their music to influence people on the struggles in that time since it was way more popular. Police brutality was what they have mostly struggled with. Police brutality is still popular today just not as much as it was decades ago.

Despite the fact that african americans were facing racism in the late 1900s, the prejudice against african americans has always been around. For example, when slavery ended, the prejudice was even stronger, now that the black man had his own rights and freedom, yet white people were still keeping themselves segregated from african americans. Even when a black man would want to have a meal at a restaurant, if a white owner didn’t want a person of color in his restaurant, he had the ability to not grant them service.

Up until this day, with racism still being around, you’d think with laws being passed about granting everyone their rights regardless of race, that it helps fix the problem of racism just a little bit, but it’s beginning to feel like history is relapsing again with the amount of prejudice there still is today. For another example, Rosa Parks, who was arrested simply because she didn’t want to give up her seat on a bus and was told to go the back of the bus. There was no crime committed, no murder, no battery, all she said was no and was incarcerated for it.

Another person who had big influence on racism was Martin Luther King Jr, who was a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s up until his death. During his time of life, when he lead the civil rights movements, he accomplished things that other african americans could only be so hopeful for, King ended the legal segregation of african americans in the United States.

Lastly, after all the examples and explanations of racism, I personally think racism is unjust and unnecessary. There is literally no explanation to why someone could be so hateful on someone who is a different skin tone than someone else. Aside from stereotypes on african americans and vice versa, the prejudice against african americans is immature and definitely says alot about how childish a racist person is. Even with the racism today, with police officers finding a reason and even coming up with absurd reasons to shoot or arrest a black man, they’re starting to make it seem like they do it for fun now knowing they can get away with it. That’s personally how I feel about racism and why I’m against it.

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A Prehistory of Scientific Racism

In his book “Critique of Black Reason,” philosopher Achille Mbembe writes that whiteness is, “in many ways, a fantasy produced by the European imagination, one that the West has worked hard to naturalize and universalize.” It is a fantasy long in the making. Categorizing and ascribing meaning to difference is a common human trait; we often need to categorize to get by and make sense of the world around us. Sometimes this classification is harmless, and sometimes not. Many ancient texts, for instance, spoke of and ascribed difference to peoples, but did not racialize. It is only with the so-called Age of Exploration, when Europeans reached the western hemisphere, or extended their reach and power deeper into Africa or Asia, that the conditions for a racialized social structure were fully in place.

What would become what we can now recognize as racial formation initially took the language of theology for its model. One particularly common model for arranging beings in the world were cosmic hierarchies, sometimes called a scala naturae (ladder of nature) or the “Great Chain of Being.” These ladders or chains envisioned all creation as connected in a hierarchy from the lowest to the highest forms of being, frequently with God on top after the rise of Christianity.

Attested in antiquity, as early as in the philosophy of Aristotle (384–322 BC), they were topics of much debate throughout the Middle Ages and into early modernity. The scalae were often ordered on the level of species. They rarely included racial classifications before the 1600s, when racial thinking entered so-called Western consciousness to stay. Early racial scalae , like those of economist and statistician William Petty (1676) or anatomist Edward Tyson (1699), didn’t garner much attention, but by the time the aptly named physician Charles White offered his white supremacist “An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables; and from the Former to the Latter” in 1799, racial classification was a welcome tool for those who wanted to motivate the violent conquest of people, land, and resources.

The essentialism of racial thinking took long to develop. Ancient Greeks, Romans, and others displayed varieties of xenophobia, but almost always with an “escape hatch” in conversion or assimilation. Slow movements toward essentialism in prejudices about European Jewry and Black Africans took place over centuries. While anti-Judaism had been part and parcel of Christianity almost from its inception, it wasn’t until the 12th and 13th centuries that some began to speak about an insurmountable difference between Jews and Gentiles. And although the association of the color black with evil has long roots, it didn’t translate everywhere into anti-Black sentiment. Spanish anti-Judaism started to include ideas about the purity of blood ( limpieza de sangre ) in the 14th and 15th centuries, framed in terms of whether someone was Christian or not, rather than in terms of white and nonwhite, but it stands as a historical “segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era,” writes historian and author George M. Fredrickson, in its incipient biologization of difference. Similarly, while it was never universally accepted, the so-called curse of Ham gradually connected Black Africans with Noah’s son Ham, who was cursed by his father to be a servant. The curse was the basis for centuries of debate about the legitimacy of enslaving Black people; some used it to motivate enslavement, and others to oppose it.

Death followed wherever Europeans went, at the barrel of a gun, but also through disease, starvation, and abusive labor practices.

With the advent of settler colonialism around the turn of the 16th century, something else had to take the place of religious language, not least because slavery sat awkwardly next to Christian universalist claims about the unlimited possibility of salvation through Jesus. The so-called discovery of lands previously unknown to Europeans was quickly followed by exploitation, appropriation, and domination. Death followed wherever Europeans went, at the barrel of a gun, but also through disease, starvation, and abusive labor practices.

While the word itself wouldn’t be coined until 1944, European colonialism was a genocidal project: Indigenous American populations came close to extermination after 1492; the Guanches of the Canary Islands were exterminated between 1478 and 1541; and the native Tasmanians were similarly destroyed between 1803 and 1876. Those who survived colonization were often forcibly moved from ancestral lands, such as in the Swedish colonization of Sápmi starting with the introduction there of silver mining in 1635 and culminating in 1919 with forced relocations lasting into the early 1930s. Many peoples were moved again when the lands reserved for them turned out to be valuable to colonizers after all, as happened to Aboriginal Australians until at least the 1950s, the Lakota Sioux after gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills in 1874, or Indigenous populations in the southwestern United States during the series of forced displacements between 1830 and 1850 known as the Trail of Tears.

New rationalizations were needed to motivate nation building and rapid expansion of world trade, and justify the colonial expansion, exploitation, expulsion, and extermination of Indigenous populations necessary for the profitability of these projects. European encounters with people unfamiliar to them led to questions about whether everyone could be considered part of the same “family of man” and soon thereafter, for example, the moral affordances of enslaving some people.

The so-called Enlightenment also focused on ideals of freedom, natural rights, and equality — rhetorics difficult to reconcile with oppression and subjugation. Distinctions between Europeans of different nationalities, or “Europeans” as an imagined supranational grouping, and their Others were manufactured, producing hierarchies designed to order and motivate ideas of human superiority and inferiority. Through racialization, physical characteristics became the basis for social positioning, and ideas about those characteristics were tied to supposed mental, social, moral, and intellectual traits, among others. These folk understandings of difference were then used to inform policy, law, and social organization. It is in this mix of social and economic structures along with the significations and representations of differences between groups of human beings, often on the basis of skin color, that the “master category” of race would be created, with Europe and thus whiteness at its center.

One of the most thoroughgoing early embraces of racial thinking took place in England’s North American colonies around the turn of the 18th century. The use of unfree labor has a long history. Slavery appears in ancient sources like the Bible or Code of Hammurabi (ca. 18th century BCE). The monocultural mass plantation of sugar in Europe and tobacco in British America were both based largely on forms of enslavement of what is now considered “white” people through indentured labor or forced labor for rebels who were deported to the colonies. But in the latter case, in large part because of the increased enslavement of Black people along with the growing labor unrest that threatened social stability and elite profits, a shift would take place throughout the 1600s, after which a system of Black racial oppression and a new racial formation of white supremacy would be firmly in place.

Indeed, chattel slavery is central to the story of the invention of the “white race” in what would become the United States and elsewhere. Although it is easy to imagine chattel slavery as being an effect of racism, it is more accurate to say that racism was an effect of chattel slavery. Whiteness and Blackness were invented to produce a dividing line between Europeans and Africans in British America. Rich and poor whites were said to have more in common with each other than with anybody not sharing their outward appearance, while Indigenous populations were placed in a separate category. This racial formation was accomplished in part through the interplay between representations of Black people as non- or subhuman, and through laws that, for instance, enshrined racial slavery and the status of Black people as property in the founding documents of the United States. Meanwhile, whites of all classes were successively granted privileges — chief among them, prior to the U.S. Civil War, were the presumption of liberty, right to immigration and naturalization, and right to vote. In her book “ The History of White People ,” Historian Nell Irvin Painter notes that “the abolition of economic barriers to voting by white men made the United States, in the then common parlance, ‘a white man’s country,’ a polity defined by race and limited to white men.”

The construction of a racially structured society was further accomplished through legislative and cultural means as well as racialized violence. At a time when abolitionism was gaining a stronger footing in the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 held that Black people — whether free or enslaved — had “ no rights which the white man was bound to respect ” and codified beyond doubt the racist foundations of the U.S. American polity. The decision would be nullified with the abolition of slavery, but the sentiment remained. Reconstruction failed miserably, as has been noted by writers from W. E. B. Du Bois to Carol Anderson, and anti-Black racism only increased in the following decades, bringing with it a wave of vociferous and violent white supremacy. Other socioracial hierarchies were constructed elsewhere by other colonial European powers and have continued to be constructed into our own time. That doesn’t mean all white people were treated as equals, in the United States or elsewhere; rhetoric and reality often diverge.

Efforts to maintain white supremacist racial formations were increasingly couched in scientific language throughout the 18th century.

Efforts to maintain white supremacist racial formations were increasingly couched in scientific language throughout the 18th century. Through the taxonomic efforts of naturalists like Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), whose classification of living organisms (1735) included a division of humanity into different “varieties” (European, American Indian, Asian, and African), race was factored into humankind’s place(s) in the Great Chain of Being. Writing in the early 1700s, historian Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722) claimed that France’s ruling class was descended from the superior Germanic Franks, linking class to nascent racial thinking. In England, too, myths of superior Germanic blood were foundational to the creation of an “Anglo-Saxon” people, whose imagined racial supremacy formed the basis for a new national identity movement. By the Enlightenment, ideas about “race” had become commonplace and many leading European thinkers of the day were well versed in racializing languages. Although many naturalists like Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707–1788) saw differences in pigmentation, for example, as environmentally based, they often nonetheless ranked the “races,” assuming white Europeans to be superior at all turns (and those “races” living in less propitious environs as “degenerated” in one way or another).

This is not to say that the “science” of race as it emerged in these years was consistent or uniform. In the 1795 third edition of his pamphlet “On the Natural Variety of Mankind,” German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who introduced the label “Caucasian” to describe white people, “gamely notes the existence of twelve competing schemes of human taxonomy and invites the reader to ‘choose which of them he likes best,’” writes Painter. Blumenbach’s own schema of five “races” gained widespread acceptance, but racist theorists have never managed to agree on a stable number of supposedly immutable races. By Blumenbach’s third edition, skin color played a large role in what was considered the science of race. He included skin color in his taxonomy and ranked white skin the highest, as belonging to the “oldest variety of man,” although skin color was ascribed to climate and experience rather than innate qualities, and “Caucasian” whiteness was extended as far as the Ural Mountains and Ganges. There was also an ongoing struggle in the 19th century between people who advocated a monogenetic understanding of humankind’s origin and those who advocated a polygenetic understanding. Adherents of the former believed that all human races shared the same origin, whether divine or natural, but had since diverged, while the latter instead believed — heretically to some — that different races had different origins.

By the dawn of the 19th century, race was being turned into biology and classified as something ostensibly “natural.” Supposedly innate differences between whites and “inferior” peoples were increasingly used as a justification for the unequal distribution of rights and resources, even as doctrines of “natural rights” were widely touted. While other thinkers were more influential at the time, ethnologist Arthur de Gobineau’s (1816–1882) posthumous influence would be immense. In his 1853–1855 “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races,” Gobineau claimed among other things that France’s population consisted of three races — Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans — that corresponded to the country’s class structure. The scientification of race and whiteness continued through uses of naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859), particularly racialized in so-called social Darwinism, which applied ideas of “natural selection” to humans, and argued that racial and class inequalities were rooted in biological differences rather than social inequities. This worldview was used to oppose social policies meant to help the poor, children, or women, among others, further manufacturing and enshrining differences between not only white and nonwhite people but different classes of white people too. Darwinian assertions were also used to legitimize genocide: the “higher” races were naturally bound to overtake the “lower.”

Other schools of racial thought appeared as well: Craniometry, phrenology, and eugenics are examples of supposedly scientific ways of measuring racial characteristics used to motivate policy and cultural shifts that privileged certain whites, and oppressed or marginalized peoples of color and other whites. These means of racialization allowed for new forms of racial projects, which helped establish racial formations wherein race-based legal and economic organization could form the basis for naturalization and exclusion from citizenship, residential segregation, and forced sterilization, among other things.

Such racialization processes and racial projects would find their most rationalized expressions in what historian George M. Fredrickson calls the 20th century’s three “overtly racist regimes”: Nazi Germany (1933–1945), the Jim Crow U.S. South (1870s–1960s), and apartheid South Africa (1948–1994). All three regimes had explicitly racist official ideologies, expressed their ideas of racial difference most harshly in laws forbidding interracial marriage, legally mandated social segregation, excluded designated out-groups from public office or the franchise, and limited out-group access to resources and economic opportunities. While they differed in their specifics, they all promoted racial formations that anchored and upheld white supremacy against groups defined as nonwhite, whether the major differentiation ran primarily along a color line (white to black) or between different phenotypically white groups (“Aryan” to “non-Aryan”/Jewish).

Darwinian assertions were used to legitimize genocide: the “higher” races were naturally bound to overtake the “lower.”

Although opposition had been brewing for decades, particularly in Black critiques of biologistic or “scientific” racism, it was only around the Second World War and after that established racial thinking was thoroughly challenged in white spaces (and then largely with reference to the critiques offered by white critics). Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler had, to use Fredrickson’s phrasing, given racism a “bad name.” The idea that race is a determinative biological fact was reconsidered and labeled a social myth by, for instance, the United Nations. Explicit interpersonal racism largely became unacceptable in white public arenas in the postwar period, while structural racism remained (and remains) largely unconsidered and unaddressed in many of the same spaces. Nevertheless, the explicitly racist legal organization that upheld white supremacy remained in place in the Jim Crow South and South Africa. The forced sterilization of non- or less-than-white “undesirables” (around 63,000 people, starting in 1935) continued in Sweden until 1976 for the “good of the race.” In the United States, following a 1927 Supreme Court decision to uphold Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act, as many as 70,000 forced sterilizations were carried out . The greatest beneficiaries of the move away from biological race theories were in many cases phenotypically white groups that were granted more secure white racialization.

In their landmark book “Racial Formation in the United States,” Michael Omi and Howard Winant write that in our day, race is primarily a political phenomenon. To a great extent, it always was. The meaning of race is often rooted in political contestation between state and civil society, and among different groups in relation to the state; nation-states have been engaged in racial definition for centuries, determining who can be a citizen, who can marry whom, who can reproduce, who can live where, and so on. A given state’s racial classifications shape people’s status, access, rights, and much more. Those racialized as white in different states frequently work, consciously or not, to maintain their privilege against those not so classified, or engage in a delicate dance to give up enough space to allow some into whiteness while keeping others out. This is not surprising. Whiteness may be a fantasy, but for many who profit from it, it is a fantasy worth believing in. Being counted as white continues to materially and decisively impact on who can live in what ways in much of the contemporary West as well as much of the rest of the world, and if they can even attempt a life there to begin with.

Martin Lund is Senior Lecturer, Department of Society, Culture, and Identity at Malmö University. He is the author of several books, including “ Whiteness ,” from which this article is excerpted.