Racism and Capitalism in Contemporary America
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Today we are facing an America that has been shaped by the excesses of the 1970s and 1980s, including a resurgence of racism and a perversion of capitalism often described as sheer greed. The two trends are sometimes related, with the in-group in society seeing it as necessary to maintain out-group status for certain racial minorities in order to protect its own economic position. Indeed, economically the races in America have long been placed in competition, so that a gain for one is seen as a loss for the other. It is difficult to overcome this perception and to convince people that economic gain for everyone is also good for everyone. Neither racism nor greed is peculiarly American, but both seem to have developed in America because of conceptions of social status progress that have a distinctly American flavor, based on a history both of racist behavior and social behaviors directed toward economic change. 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
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ca's racist past is affirmative action, and this approach has been heavily criticized for being, in effect, a form of reverse racism. Battles over affirmative action heated up in the 1970s with suits on both sides as blacks called for affirmative action to redress past discrimination and some whites challenged these rules as a form of reverse discrimination. Supporters of affirmative action, which is a requirement that businesses or other institutions reach out to black applicants in order to increase their numbers to something closer to their ratio in society, state that without it, racial discrimination in employment and education would continue. Critics suggest that these policies have not helped blacks at all and have indeed impeded the development of coalitions for social programs and have inhibited black Americans through a deep sense of inferiority. Benjamin Hooks disagrees and states:
If a society discriminates against a people for centuries--enslaves them, lynches them, oppresses them, denies them access to jobs, homes, a good education, the political process, etc.--the just way to offer remedy is to give that people an equal opportunity (Hooks 129).
Shelby Steele offers a different perspective and says that affi
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Approximate Word count = 2270
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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