Racism: An Essentialist Category

Anzia Yezierska also had to work harder than most to achieve her American Dream. As an immigrant coming to America she was excited to encounter the new experiences that come along with moving to America. She hopes to find a job where she can use her intelligence but she stumbles along some hard spots while on her journey. When she first comes to America she ends up working for a Russian family which just so happens to be where she comes from. She describes the family as “Americans” it is in quotation marks because she is calling them fake Americans. Anzia believes that the family has tried to reject their Heritage and conform to this new society, without remembering where they have come from. While working for this family she is treated very poorly and does not receive any wages and she chooses to never work for an American family again. Anzia came to America in hopes to find a job where she will be able to use her intelligence “I’d be a creator, as giver, a human being, my work would be the living job of expression (Yezierska 6)”. Anzia is unable to get the type of job she wants because she does not speak English. “Here I was with so much richness, but my mind was not wanted without the language (Yezierska 9)”. She quickly gets discouraged and begins to question the American dream as shown in the following quote…“Who am I? What do I want? Where

Power can be displayed through architecture in a wide array of forms i.e. wealth, class, cleanliness, and structure. Power is described in many ways and portrayed by others differently based from experiences. In regards to architecture, my definition of power is described through overall structure and the vibe of the building. When returning to downtown Tucson, I went to the building which I thought portrayed this power, was The Cadence apartments.

Racism is a socially constructed concept used by multiple groups of people and creates a hierarchy of sorts based purely on the color of a person’s skin or their cultural origins. It has been an idea that has existed since the beginnings of civilization. A more modern iteration of this concept was made prominent in the 16th century as European settlers began to explore different areas of the world, specifically areas in or around Africa. But slavery can be seen back in the 1500s all the way to 1880 and was most likely a leading example of what helped define racism up to the 20th century. In Ali Rattansi’s book, “Racism: A Very Short Introduction” , the author connects how slavery and race are closely tied together. European explorers would ignore the cultures the invaded in order to see these people as nothing more than native groups that were meant to be seen in a subservient role. Slavery would continue to grow across the Atlantic and seen as an institution that created large amounts of wealth for those who could reap the benefits from it. As long as money was being made, slavery persisted and was justified. Race and racism was conceived the way it was because the slave owning system was controlled by European colonizers.

THESIS: Scientists and other intellectuals recognize the modern concept of "race" as an artificial category that developed over the past five centuries due to encounters with non-European people. Even though people still attempt to organize humans into categories according to their race, these categories have been shown to have no scientific basis.

What is race? Some people attach "race" to a biological meaning, yet others use "race" as a socially constructed concept. “Most biologists and anthropologists do not recognize race as a biologically valid classification, in part because there is more genetic variation within groups than between them” (. So, it is clear that even though race does not have a biological meaning, it does have a social meaning - usually detrimental to our social harmony. Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but

The most important theme in this book was the trials and tribulations of racism because it was woven in every part of the plot, it contributed to the conflict and resolutions, and gave the story a connection to current events, helping the reader’s comprehension.

In retrospect, I had always thought of race as the color and culture of a person. If some had brick colored skin and loved tacos or spoke Spanish, he or she was Mexican. Dark skin instinctively made someone black. As a child, I had these ideas of what race was and it all seemed innocuous. Today, I am stricken with the true meaning of race and its affects. Omi and Winant describes race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55). This definition describes race as a social construct that uses the relation of physical appearances and color to group individuals. “There is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete and objective” (Omi and Winant 54). This specific sentence caught my attention because it was how I defined race. Growing up as child, I spent my life in several different homes. Realizing how race had a huge influence in those homes, ultimately made me think of race as an essence. I was told that my mother’s family would

This issue of racism is popular by name but tends to be sugar coated by the way people see it. In order to truly understand racism you need to take a bite into the topic in order to get a taste of what it is really like. Racism comes in many different forms and can be seen many different ways. But why even care about racism at all? Why does it even matter? One would think that with such a harsh background regarding racism in America it would no longer exist in society today. But sadly that is not the case here, racism continues to show up all over the country sometimes being worse than others but still racism is racism. People should all be considered equal regardless of what they look like, talk like, or even do that makes them who they are.

The anecdotal instances of racism in Rankin’s Citizen together demonstrates the existence of a structural form of racism. The anecdotes demonstrates that if a person is of colour they suffer different treatment which distinguish them to be an ‘other’ type of person. The idea behind these racist encounters can be further categorized into three categories: overt racism, covert racism, and institutional racism, and these ideas together form the basis behind structural racism.

Race is a social-constructed terminology where it categorizes people into groups that share certain distinctive physical characteristics such as skin color. However, race and racial identity is unstable, unfixed and constantly shifting, as race, typically, is a signifier of prevalent social conflict and interest. Although, many, particularly anthropologists and sociologists, argue in the aforementioned point of view, some – mainly white population -- believe that racial characteristics are biologically inherited.

Systematic racism continues to perpetuate the marginalization of people of color in the 21st century despite belief of living in a post racial society. This unfortunate reality is seen in many different forms of current culture. One of the ways systematic racism takes current form, is in the negative portrayal created by a single narrative, or the lack thereof, minority groups. This lack of representation or diversity of people of color in different forms of art and platforms, not only affects those subject to misrepresentation, but perpetuates negative attitudes and discriminatory behavior towards those subject to misrepresentation. It is necessary to look into the ways this single narrative in different art forms affects marginalized group, and the current move to dismantle the component power plays in who gets to tell these stories.

Racial discrimination has persisted in American societies from the oppressiveness of servitude to lawful seclusion. Digressing in severity, Americans are presently burdened with the modern manifestation of those years of racial intolerance and prejudice - a new definition of racism. While slavery and lawful segregation, such as Jim Crow Laws, are a thing of the past – by less than a century – racism is still an intrinsic societal problem that has subliminally permeated American culture. A 1947 study to determine the racial preference of “Negro” children exemplified the preference Caucasian and African American children, of all skin pigmentations, had for white baby dolls, which were inherently more beautiful and desirable (Clark and Clark p. 169-78). Variations of this study repeated as late as 2010, show little improvement of this perception that a white baby doll is more desirable and attractive than a colored baby doll (Cooper).

Since essentialism plays an integral role in the article, it is fruitful to examine the concept using different perspectives. Perhaps the most obvious way to think of racial essentialism is to view it in the terms of categorization. In

The idea of race has been constructed over hundreds of years, with numerous cultural implications arising from this construction. Since Johann Fredrich Blumenbach’s racial hierarchy, the inventor of a “…modern racial classification" (Gould 1994:66), the idea of race as a scientific truth justified slavery, colonisation and other existing racial structures. We see these racial hierarchies with notions of white superiority affecting events around the globe everyday; regardless of the fact that race has been proven as a flawed biological concept, with racial categories a result of ‘pseudo science’. The events following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are evidence of the racist attitudes that linger in our society, institutionally and in everyday life – racism is more than simply individual attitudes, and is embedded in the social structures of society.

To understand whether or not racism is learnt, we first have to divulge into the nature of racism. It is usually assumed that racism has been a part of civilisation since civilisation started, that it is embedded into how people work and that no matter what, it will always exist. Another assumption is that racism derives from the capitalism of the slave trade by white elitist men seeking to dehumanize people for economic gain, and used racism as a way to mask their financial motives to justify enslavement as righteous. After anti-slavery movements began to happen, the capitalist motives behind slavery “took on a new form as the justification of the ideology of imperialism” [4].