Themes Of Racism In America

This paper discusses the theme of institutional racism and its effects on blacks in America. It will show how racism has persisted in the United States from its arrival on slave ships supplying cheap labor for White capitalist. They physical bondage endured until President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." This allowed Blacks to achieve a temporary freedom from the chains of bondage, while remaining bound by the clasps of racism. For this compare and contrast paper I will be using Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s article of “Racial Formation in the United States” to show the formation of racism in the consciousness of White Americans. I will also utilize Angela Davis’ “Race and criminalization: Black Americans and the punishment industry” to show that racism has become so ingrained in the psyche of White America that it reaffirms the confinement of Blacks to bondage and again allows the capitalization of …show more content…
The view of Omi and Winant is that by being simply “inserted in a comprehensively racialized social structure race becomes “common sense” – away of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world (Omi and Winant 1986, 60). While Angela Davis believes that structural racism is so deeply entrenched in the psyches of the collectives that it manifests as covert racism that mobilizes deep fears of Blacks. Both articles recognizes fear as an integral component of racism and color blindness as integral to the social structure of racism. Yet they differ in their view of how race serves people of color. For Whites race represents many dimensions, while for Blacks race produces the fear of crime and legitimizes structural