y 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 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 (Feagin and Feagin, 1986, 1).
Racism was long described as if it were a regional problem relegated largely to the Old South where the white population resented the loss of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves. There was racism in the South, but there was also racism in the North. After the era of slavery, blacks were relegated to the back of the bus on public transportation, to exclusively black neighborhoods in housing, and were excluded fr
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