What is Racism? Racism is one of those unusual things which seem to escape the understanding of clear and to the point definition. Racism is a system of racial discrimination and prejudice. The concept of race as classifying people can be seen as misleading people and prejudicial as far as it’s involved in the quality of human life. The term race has been quite confusing because of its four principle connotations.
1. Physical anthropologists have called races the various subspecies of the human race characterized by certain phenotypical and genotypic traits. 2. Laymen have profusely used the word race to describe a human group that shares certain cultural characteristics such as language or religion. 3.
Race has been loosely used as a synonym for species. 4. Many social scientists describe race as a human group that defines itself and / or is defined by other groups as different from other groups by moral excellence of having an essential characteristics and unchangeable characteristics. (Van den Berg he, Race and Racism pg. 42) The last key term to define racism is any set of beliefs that organic, genetically transmitted differences between human groups are associated with the presence or the absence of certain socially relevant abilities or characteristics, hence that such differences are a legitimate basis of invidious distinctions between groups socially defined as races. Racism in America There is no nation in the world that sees “racism” as a greater fear than the United States.
The press and public have become so used to seeing murder, rape, robbery, and arson that any crime except the most shocking ones are pushed to the side. Racism is never pushed to the side. For example when a white law school student at Georgetown reported that black students were not as qualified as white students, it made a big controversy about racism. If the student would have murdered some one it would have caused less attention. Racism is an obsession. Universities are always on top of it, newspapers and politicians reject it, churches are against it, and America is strained with it.
Insurance Fund of New York made a company pamphlet in which she explains that all whites are racist and that only whites can be racist. (Thomas Jackson, What is Racism? Published Although some blacks and liberal whites acknowledge that non – whites have been forced into it as self defense because of centuries of white oppression. What would be called racism when done by whites is thought to be normal when done by any one else. The opposite is also true. At a few college campuses, students that disagree with affirmative action have set up a student union for whites, analogous to those for blacks, Hispanics, etc, and have been accused of being racists. Today, one of the favorite slogans that define the unorganized quality of American Racism is “celebration of diversity.” People have begun to realize that “diversity” is always achieved at the expense of whites, and never the other way around.
There is another curious organization about American racism. When non whites express their own racial purposes, no one accuses them of “hating” another group. Whites on the other hand, only need to express their support for affirmative action to be called haters. So what is racism? Many people believe it is whites against other cultures only, and it is any of the normal aspirations of groups that have defined nations since the beginning of history, but only so long as the aspirations are those of whites..