Cornel West Genealogy Of Modern Racism Analysis

In his essay “ Genealogy of Modern Racism” (2002), Cornel West argues that whites have been conditioned to treat blacks inferiorly in beauty, culture and intellectual abilities because of the structures of modern discourse. (P.90) Many writers have mentioned the differences between the blacks and whites but most of them against the idea of the blacks being equal to the whites in any form. Some of the writers are J. J. Winckelmann who portrayed ancient Greece as a world of beautiful bodies. (P.97) Another example is “Winthrop Jordan and Thomas Gossett have shown that there are noteworthy premodern racist viewpoints aimed directly and indirectly at nonwhite, especially black, people.” (P.98) Giordano Bruno made a similar claim, but had in mind …show more content…
However, white intellectuals feel that blacks, apart from the physical differences, were also inherently unintelligent, and few have even challenged to name any black who has done a great deed in the world – writers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire of the French Enlightenment. Hume and Jefferson of the Scotch and the American Enlightenment, and Kant of the German Enlightenment not merely held racist views: they also uncritically - during this age of criticism. (P.105) In sum, that is why whites felt that they were better than blacks, and that only they were deserving of the high posts and elite position in society, refusing to consider blacks on their …show more content…
The Japanese could have been another example of a nation that was marginalized, poor and victim of geopolitics problem that could easily resulted in an oppression and discrimination nation like many developing countries but instead they, the Japanese decided to rebuild and it turned out that Japan become one of the most powerful nations in the developed world. I am not sure if this a good example, because it is not about racism within a society, but about geopolitics between two countries at war (even if they were of “different races”) Another example of resistance is the Jews who were persecuted and killed throughout history, culminating in the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, the genocide in which Adolf Hitler 's Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. It was by sticking together as nation and using education as their strategy to overcome racism that today Jewish communities are among the most educated people around the world and are present in many prestigious institutions and elite