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The Explicit Oppression, And Societal Disadvantages Experienced

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The explicit oppression, and societal disadvantages experienced by racial and ethnic minorities in the United States are those that are a product of past racism and discriminatory practices based on prejudice towards the collective minority groups. Although many of the explicit discriminatory practices based on race are frowned upon in the U.S. today, that does not suggest that they do not still exist. The racism of contemporary times has only shifted form and is used against minorities in the form of institutionalized and societal racist practices. The maintenance as well as protection of the white supremacy is the key driver behind past and contemporary forms of racism and discrimination. In Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of …show more content…

At the time of slavery, in order to create this process, whites used phenotypical differences between blacks and whites to dehumanize and make blacks seem inferior to whites. Some of these examples of the degradation of blacks based on phenotype are the differences in genitalia “observed” by white scientists and used to explain blacks as being sexually deviant, meaning they were a threat to the maintenance of white supremacy. This logic of slavery for blacks still holds true today but just in a different form. This being in the form of institutionalized practices of racism; which mimic slavery in that they are a method of putting the black race at a disadvantage and creating profit from them.. In The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America by Bonilla-Silva indicated that the racist practices of today that put primarily blacks at disadvantage, have shifted away from the overt slavery/Jim Crow styles of racism, and have shifted to a new racial ideology that Bonilla-Silva calls color-blind racism. Bonilla-Silva writes, “...Instead whites rationalize minorities contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations (pg.2).” Overall meaning that today,

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