Racism

                The first article ‘Is racism a Western Idea?’ refers to racism as: “the hierarchical ranking of human beings based on biological characteristics.” Racism usually is necessarily rooted from biology because color is hereditary in nature. Many scholars believe that the practice of slavery stemmed the grounds for racism. Slavery has been around for thousands of years. Many ancient groups such as the; Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Assyrians all practiced slavery. The Greeks and Romans employed slaves as domestic servants. In some ancient civilizations, slaves were also used as objects of trade and as a form of currency. The most interesting part is that often time’s slavery had nothing to do with race. In fact, slaves were sometimes the same race as their masters. Slaves back then were graded on social status not race or color. Europeans began to think that some races were superior to others just by nature because they believed in the bible that all men were created at the same time. If that is true then they couldn’t explain why some cultures were more advanced than other cultures. They started to attribute that to race and color.  European people noticed that the people they considered barbarian were dark-skinned. They began to think that there must be some relationship between physical attributes of race and civilizational achievement.

I like how the second article sheds some light on the face that racism is not just for white people anymore. When we discriminate against another minority it’s extremely looked down upon, but it is somehow more acceptable for them to do it to us. The situation with the “Sprite Step Off” step-dancing competition just goes to show how some forms of racism are more equal than others. If an all-black group would have won there would have been no conflict. Also, I like how it talked about the fact that the United States gets stereotyped for our large amounts of racism, when there are countries far worse. We wouldn’t be considered a ‘melting pot’ if we weren’t acceptable of many different kinds of immigrants. We are more open to cultural diversity that any other country. The experiment that psychology teacher Rebecca Bigler did with preschool students by making them wear different colored shirts, really showed that superficial ideas of superiority are engraved in our brains from such an early age. Whether or not the children wearing opposite colored shirts were friends before the experiment they stopped being friends with each other over the t-shirts because they thought that somehow the color t-shirt they wore meant something, as if it made them better than their classmates wearing the other colored shirt.

Article three ‘Cultural Bias for Racism’ talks about how America’s culture could be the biggest contributor to racism. We are all a little bit racist whether we know it or not. The stereotypes we hear and things we see are engraved into our minds. Every group of people has a stereotype. Blacks are associated with laziness, women with weakness, white males with power and wealth, old with lonely, children with reckless. The study they did with their subject’s response times of paring stereotypical words together. I feel that the responses they received would be similar to anyone in Americas. We’re all subject to the stereotypes that we hear every day. I don’t think that that text necessarily proves that were all crazy prejudice or anything, it just means that we’ve often seen and heard these words associated with each other a lot in our society. Of course, with all of these stereotypes engraved in our minds, we need to realize that it’s normal, we all have them. We shouldn’t feel guilty for having the same thoughts as everyone else. What really matters is our behavior about them.

1.    Is Racism culturally universal or a Western civilization concept? Is it a byproduct of media and western culture?

I believe that racism is absolutely universal. The struggle of racism occurs in almost every part of the world. I believe that it’s not necessarily a direct byproduct of Western Culture but could be greatly influenced by the elements in the culture of where we are. Like it said in article 3, “Literature, movies, TV, radio and the Internet all contribute to the problem by exhibiting the same stereotypes that others work so hard to snuff out.”

2.      Where did racism come from and when did it start?

Racism has been around since the beginning of time. Racism was around before even slavery, slavery was just a reinforcement of racism. The phycologist in the first article stated: “We do have accounts by Chinese historians in the third century B.C. describing encounters with savage people “who greatly resemble the monkeys from whom they are descended.” Muslim travelers during the Middle Ages frequently made derogatory comments about blacks.” It goes to show that there were signs of color consciousness in the ancient world. The first real account of European racism happened as the Europeans were exploring different parts of the world. They noticed all the different colors of skin on people. They came up with conclusions such as their skin color being an adaptation to their climate. They also noticed that in most cases, the cultures of the darker skinned people were less advanced than white culture. They began to conclude that there was a direct relationship to race and civilizational achievement. The darker skinned you were, the dumber you were basically.

3.      Is racism everywhere?

Yes, many believe that the United states has the largest role in racism in the world, which is not true. As stated in the 2^nd article, “In East Asian countries such as Japan and China, other Asians rank below natives, Europeans pass muster as civilized creatures, Middle Easterners are a cut below, and Africans are barely tolerated—most think of them as second-rate humans at best. In Latin America, where most people are “mestizos” of mixed racial heritage, there still exists a kind of caste system headed by creoles of mostly European descent.” I feel that racism does exist everywhere in the world where there is mixed races. We all have eyes that can see the different colors of skin, for almost all of us; it’s the first thing we notice about a person. For some reason we feel that that is good enough reason to treat each other differently.