The Development of Racism Essay -- Slavery Racist Equality Segregation

The Development of RacismSlaverys twin legacies to the present are the accessible and economic lower status it conferred upon blacks and the cultural racism it instilled in whites. Both sojourn to haunt our society. Therefore, treating slaverys enduring legacy is necessarily controversial. Unlike slavery, racism is non over yet. (Loewen 143)Racism can be defined as whatsoever set of beliefs, which classifies humanity into distinct collectives, defined in terms of vivid and/or cultural attributes, and ranks these attributes in a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority (Blum 5). It can be directly linked to the past and still, centuries later, serves as a painful reminder that race continues to be one of the sharpest and deepest divisions in American life (Loewen 138). What were the causes of racism? How did it develop historically? In order to settlement those complex questions, I plan to examine the conditions of Americas history from colonialism to present daytime so ciety. It was these conditions of Americas past that promoted the development of racist practices and ideas that continue to be embraced by more to this day. The idea of superiority and inferiority of entire groups were largely the result of the encounters amidst the Europeans and the indigenous native peoples of the Americas. Christopher Columbus was one of the first individuals who played a chief role in the birth of both racism and slavery. Upon the alleged(prenominal) discovery of America, European self-consciousness rose to the point that Europeans began to notice the similarities between each other. There were no white people in Europe in front 1492 (Loewen, 66). But after the beginning of transatlantic slave trade, Europeans began to see white ... ...mproved, oddly as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, racial inequalities still stick around from income to IQ levels, to the number of the incarcerated and life expectancies. While Americans like to think of our land as the equal land of opportunity, clearly it is not. Racism continues to remain our American Obsession (Loewen 139). Works CitedBlum, Lawrence. Im Not A Racist But The moralistic Quandary of Race. New York Cornell University Press, 2002. 5Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power, The Indispensable Chromsky. Eds. Peter R. Mitchell and caper Schoeffel. New York New Press, 2002. 135.Loewen, James. Lies My Techer Told Me Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York Simon & Schuster, 1995. 60-169.Zinn, Howard. A Peoples History of the United States. New York HaperCollins Publisher Inc., 1999. 25-33.