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Overt Racism Research Paper

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After a long day of classes, I find myself scrolling through twitter to update myself on the happenings of the day. The familiar red logo on CNN appears along with a hyperlinked tweet titled “Market Strategist Marc Faber under fire for racist remarks.” I sigh, but this does not surprise me. Yesterday it was a county sheriff. The day before that a Texas lawmaker. The commonplace overt racism was almost old news, something that was no longer shocking. But that does not excuse them from consequence.
Many definitions of racism exist throughout the world. However, I consider racism to be both the overt and the covert belief that one’s race is superior to another. In a sense, racism is the existence of a prejudice that is acted upon through power. …show more content…

I do, however, remember the first time I recognized that racism was not as far removed from me and my life as I had originally thought. I was ten years old, sitting in the car with my mother and my grandmother. We were driving around South Tucson, a predominantly Hispanic area of Tucson rampant with drug and gang-related violence. Out of the blue, my grandmother asked my mother where she thought was more dangerous: Raleigh or South Tucson. My mother confidently responded South Tucson, as it easily has a higher crime rate. After thinking about her answer, my grandmother asked if it “really could be safer when there are so many black people in Raleigh.” My grandmother was born in 1931 and had lived her whole life in the deep south, primarily North Carolina. I recognize that the circumstances under which she grew up greatly affected her views, but it was heartbreaking to realize that not only was racism so close to my life, but also that someone that I loved could be so prejudiced. In her later years, I could tell that she had not fully removed herself from her inherited views, but it was clear that she was attempting to remove herself from those …show more content…

While these actions are horrible on their own, the effects are exacerbated when gender is integrated. The prevalence of both racism and sexism causes the extreme persecution of those who find themselves at the intersection of both: women of color. This extreme persecution was highlighted by Desmond in “Evicted,” in which he states that women of color were overrepresented in evictions on Milwaukee, as they made up “9 percent of Milwaukee’s population and 30 percent of its evicted tenants” (Desmond, 98). He shows that this is not just a disparity between race, as he asserts that women of color were twice as likely to be evicted than men of color from the same neighborhood (Desmond, 98). This only proves that the effects of racism or the effects of sexism are exacerbated when they are found in combination with each

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