Racism
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The problem of racism is not specifically an American problem, though Americans have made it into an important political and social issue as they have tried to find a way to eliminate racism from their society. Racism occurs whenever there is a dominant racial group that uses its position to discriminate against a minority racial group on the basis of racial characteristics. Traditionally, discrimination has been seen as a creature of prejudice, and until the late 1960s the dominant perspective among social science analysts of discrimination was that prejudice and intolerance were the causes of discriminatory actions. Other observers have focused on individual racists and have seen the problem as the individual motivated by hatred of a given "outgroup." Still others consider the issue in terms of patterns of segregation and community practices. Racism in the United States has been related to the issue of slavery, since the blacks in American society are nearly all descended from slaves brought to this country beginning at the end of the seventeenth century and only freed from slavery at the end of the nineteenth century. Racism involves more than relations between Blacks and Whites, but that is probably the form that is most common in this society. Many Americans probably believe that the problem of racism has been virtually eliminated from American life, though there is ample evidence to the contrary. These people think back to the overt racism of
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l Rights Movement. According to public opinion surveys, in 1964 one American in four was opposed to open housing, and by 1966 the idea had even lost ground. After that, though, support for open housing mounted steadily so that by 1976 less than one in ten supported segregated housing and 85 percent thought blacks should be able to live wherever they could afford to live. A similar trend can be shown for support for the idea of integrated schools. In the mid-1950s, integration of the schools was supported by less than one-half of white Americans, but by the end of the 1960s it was approved by two-thirds or more of the same population.
HOW RACISM OPERATES TODAY
Though the overt racism of the past has become much less acceptable (though it has not disappeared altogether), the prevalent form of racism today is institutional racism. The concept of institutional racism was first discussed systematically by Charles Hamilton and Stokeley Carmichael in the 1960s. In this conception, the authors contrasted individual racism, illustrated by a small band of white terrorists bombing a church, with institutional racism, illustrated by the practices leading to many black children dying each year because of inadequate food, medical
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2645
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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