Defining Racism

Race is an extremely important issue in the United States. Race and racism are subjects that are brought up during every presidential debate and they are also subjects that are constantly used when writing news articles. Before reading “Define Racism” I believed that racism was using preconceived notions about a group of people to make determinations about an individual who you believed was part of that particular race. Race, to me, was how people either classified themselves or how society classifies someone. Most of the changes in my views about race and racism came from watching Race: The Power of an Illusion and White People.
After watching these two documentaries and participating in a class discussion, I realized that I had never been …show more content…
I never realized that, like José Vargas said, most white people are raised in a town that is ¾ white. I think I now understand the emphasis placed on race in today’s society, especially when individuals are raised around people of the same race. Race seems to determine what an individual is capable of and the rights that they have. “Defining Racism” spoke about three levels of racism in today’s society: individual, institutional, and social. In my life, I feel that I am not a racist and do have friends from all different ethnicities and races. The only way that racism is present on the individual level in my life is when my friends may make a racist remark to me. I will usually not let my friends get away with this because it makes me uncomfortable to be judging others without actually knowing them. On an institutional level, I believe that racism is very prevalent in my surroundings. One way that I see institutional racism is in my community. As I previously said, I live in a rich, small, white community where most of the houses cost at least a million dollars. In my community, I believe there is institutional racism because only white individuals …show more content…
In the past, blacks were treated as property, looked at as a different species, and denied basic human rights. Race: The Power of an Illusion focused on the rights denied to black people because the whites looked at them differently. During the civil rights movement, black were fighting for equal rights, which they should have had since the day they came to America. To right the wrongs of our past, we need to work to insure that all groups of individuals are treated equally and not looked down on because they are different. As a society, we need to see all of the damage that we caused to the Native American’s and back people and not let history repeat