At this point you probably decided I’m either an idiot liberal who hasn’t …show more content…
Centuries ago, when Africa was still considered the land of the unknown, it interested Europe to imperialize and “civilise” it. They thought Africans as savages that needed to be rescued. When Europeans colonized America, they thought Native Americans as savages too. The poem “The White Man’s Burden” came to be a popular poem illustrating the necessity of imperialism to civilise the “half-devil and half-child” people of the land. They always held the attitude of entitlement and superiority that developed a system of power between the white person and the minority. Slavery strengthened this system with black people especially. Slavery developed on the foundation of white people over black people. The United States delineated the rights (or lack thereof) with court cases like Dred Scott v. Sandford and North Carolina v. Mann, which declared the slave owner of having absolute authority over the slave and could not be found guilty if violence was committed against them. Even with slavery abolished, the road to equality has been long, slow, and painful as segregation became the norm. When my grandmother was a child, her family had a black cook. That cook’s children were denied of an education by the nearby white school. Infuriated, my grandmother’s father taught the children himself as he did not believe in segregation. Black people being rejected from white exclusive areas was common and my great-grandfather’s reaction was not. White people were always protected over any other group. They had power over them. We still have power over them. Racism is built on this