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Racism Is A Burden That Confuses The Past, Threatens The Future

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Rough Draft Pre-AP English 10 Kevin Richer “Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.” This is a quote from Maya Angelou.
Racism plays a big part in the history of our country. It is what brought out good leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Fredrick Douglas. It has also caused people to be segregated and enslaved. Racism, the belief that one race is superior to another according to the Webster dictionary, has left a big stain on the carpet of American history. Racism in America today is influenced by the media, exaggerated by the people, and is able to be fixed. The origins of racism go as far back as the 1600’s. During the Enlightenment, people began to think that the human race should be unified and not separated by race. According to George M. Fredrickson, a professor at Stanford, “the climax of the history of racism came in the twentieth century in the rise and fall of what might be called overtly racist regimes.” The racist regimes that he is talking about are the main axis powers in World War Two. Based on this quote, the climax of racism was then, and has slowly gone down since. We as humans tend to categorize everything from colors to the amount of money someone makes or the ethnicity that someone is. We learn to categorize as early as preschool with colors, numbers, and shapes. Therefore, separating Caucasians from African-Americans and African-Americans from Native

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