White Hegemony In America

All throughout time, people have been divided due to their differences. People who see others that are different from them will often immediately decide that they are “weird” and put those people lower than themselves. According to Linda Holtzman and Leon Sharpe in their passage, “Theories and Constructs of Race,” Race is just a social construct made by humans to exclude people based on what they look like, where they are from, their culture, etc. If scientists were to look at someone’s deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) compared to another person with, say, different colored skin, they would notice that there is not much of a difference between the two people. Therefore, as Holtzman and Sharpe say, “race is constructed socially, culturally, politically, …show more content…
In America, the concept of “race” has existed for a very long time now. This concept has been “based on false ideas, myths, and fabrications that accumulated over the centuries to form a grand, sweeping story or metanarrative to justify the exploitation of entire populations of human beings[...]” (Holtzman and Sharpe 609). White hegemony has come from these falsities. There are many people in the world that believe that if one’s skin is white, they are automatically better than everyone else. White hegemony is the trying to keep the whites “on top.” This can lead to the creation of stereotypes and crimes based on “race.” A horrible example of a race-based crime is the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a terrible event in which a number of around six million Jews were massacred because, to Adolf Hitler, the Jews were an inferior race (“The Holocaust” par. 1). It is not only assault on the physical characteristics of non-white people, but it can also be the culture. For instance, Indians have had their culture assaulted for a very long time. Since race was created, whites have always felt on top which caused white …show more content…
Race is not scientific; race is basically segregation mainly based upon different peoples’ cultures and skin color. From this segregation can come the feeling of exclusion. One example of this psychological trauma could be “internalized racism, a condition that can cause an individual to assume self-deprecating attitudes and engage in self-destructive behaviors that reflect the traumatizing effects of racial targeting” (Holtzman and Sharpe 606). Unfavorable stereotypes can trigger illness like depression or other illnesses in the brain of the target. The victim might even repeat the abuse to themselves. They might not fully trust people who are very successful because of their race and all of the stereotypes they have had ingrained in their mind. With all of these stereotypes generalizing races, the people from those different races can feel as though no one wants them. It is a spiral into poor psychological health that could affect someone for years. Padilla says, “internalized racism can sabotage communities of color” (qtd. In Holtzman and Sharpe 606). Internalized racism gets into the brains of the victims and can cause them to do things they never would have normally