Word: racism
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Gates said he chose to become an academic over the objections of his parents, who wanted their son to be a doctor or lawyer, because books and the pursuit of knowledge provided a refuge from racism...
...what extent American universities should support ethnic studies. The debate is confounded by the highly complex and somewhat abstract themes that comprise the issue. Individuals on both sides tend to oversimplify and polemicize, labeling ethnic studies advocates as screaming radical minorities and their opponents as perpetuators of white male racism...
...second tenet which disturbs us. What the AAC seems to be saying here is that racism is so firmly built into the system that non-white minorities cannot be truly empowered in America without a paradigm shift. This shift would take us away from an emphasis on universal truths to a view of knowledge as simply a conglomeration of different perspectives. This is problematic for a number of reasons...
...second problem is that, as the AAC describes it, this paradigm shift will come about mostly (though not entirely) through the study of non-white ethnic groups. This seems to imply that racism in America against non-whites is somehow inherently different from the prejudice faced by white ethnicities throughout this nation's history. This is not necessarily true--anyone who studies the problems of, say, the immigrant Irish and Jews at the turn of the century will realize that these groups faced discrimination that was much stronger and more destructive than that leveled against, say, Asians and Hispanics today...
...example, in some courses, professors and students will blithely speak about the great achievements of the civil rights movement and will claim, without a hint of irony, that heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. pretty much cured white America's racism. Yet, even the long-suffering King (everyone's favorite nonviolent martyr) became increasingly disillusioned and frustrated with America's persistent racism throughout his career and came to believe he had underestimated the hatred in America. Despite the success of the 1960s, America's legacy of white supremacy is still palpable--for example, neighborhoods in this country remain overwhelmingly segregated...