Racism

Extended Definition Essay

The majority of people ignores a great deal of issues that can help the get the real definition of the word racism. According to the dictionary definition, racism refers to the beliefs and actions that separate people based on socially established types of races or unfair treatment of other human beings because of their skin colour and the culture from their originality (Dictionary). This dictionary definition is narrow in its scope and cannot give a broader understanding of the word racism. To get the best sense of the definition of the word racism, dimensions of the word racism such as supremacy versus ‘objective’ difference and different levels of racism would assist to a great extent.

Supremacist ideology defines race a state where one group of human beings is biologically and culturally better than the other group and in that light that better group command the higher rank among all other groups. This better group was the whites, and this ideology justifies the emergence of slavery in the United States. A small percentage will stand and support the supremacy openly and publicly the way Presidential elect Donald Trump did during his campaigns. This theory differs from the ‘objective’ difference where one group of people use stereotypes to create the racial difference. For instance, the Black people can be nicknamed watermelon and fried chicken to mean that the Blacks are more associated with these stuff as compared to the Whites. Hypothetically, this brings about the racial difference in culture, where whites prefer cantaloupe whereas blacks prefer watermelon to serve the same motive. However, theoretically, and ‘objective’ difference are frequently brought into a broader picture that the Black people are inferior hence, the connection between the ‘objective’ difference and the supremacy. Another way in which people show the ‘objective’ difference is to assume that their race indeed has the necessary genetic and then connects this to biology as opposed to typical social situations. Therefore, the primary source of misconception is the theoretical distinction between the supremacy and ‘objective’ difference. These two dimensions do not come into the agreement whether the racism has taken place or not since they think in at different levels of racism.

Individual racism is the type of racism that comes as a result of personal intentions with their statements and actions. It is an inevitable outcome of our interactions into a racist community. For a better understanding, it is useful to differentiate between unconscious or implicit racism and conscious or explicit racism. Implicit Individual racism is the human mentality of categorizing people into a given race considering their complexity or voices. This attitude does not end at the point of categorizing people, after that, it goes by associating people with bias characteristic. For example, a bigger percentage of whites usually associate the Blacks with the words like ‘Bad’ when referring to their faces. Thus, these examples show vividly the state of the unconscious or implicit level of racism that comes from our daily interactions in a society dominated by different races and it is the reason why Black people accused George Zimmerman of committing an offense of racially profiling Trayvon Martin. On the other hand, conscious or explicit individual level of racism is a type of racism that constitutes consciously and actively undertaking, uttering, or possessing a belief that facilitates the viewpoint that one race is better than another. However, this type of racism is not currently standard, a majority of people in the United States today are very sensitive with their utterances and view racial supremacy as the backward and immature way of seeing the current world. Unlike the 45th Presidential elect Donald Trump who said openly that he would chase the Blacks from America.

Structural racism is a type of racism that comes when one is advantage or disadvantage because of the category where he belongs, whether White or Black and this most importantly dictates circumstances in which you live, and the way communicates with the globe. For example, the Blacks who are marijuana users are more prone to arrests than their White counterpart who also consume the same marijuana. It is because the legal framework in the United States favour the Whites and hence one side of structural racism. Structural racism is always different in the line in which Whites people tend to understand racism.

In winding up, the above definition aspects of the word racism are useful resources to make one knows the actual definition of racism and the real meaning to enable more effective interactions about the topic. However, it most imperative to keep the following point in the mind; the theory of ‘objective’ differences among races, racial categories have no actual biological grounds, inherent individual racism, and structural racism are unclear realities, explicit individual racism often faces opposition but opposing it does not make racism to an end.