Word: racisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...question is, will we ever get rid of racism? I think not. We are stuck in the tradition, passed down to us by our parents, of judging other people by their color. Try as we might, we cannot destroy the fact that, as humans, we make instantaneous judgments based on our initial impressions of others. Martin Luther King's "Dream" is an ideal, but an ideal that will never be reached, at least not until we destroy the background prejudices that pervade our subconscious...
...Racism is really a classic example of the prisoner's dilemma. Both white and black people wish to end it, but black people, seeing that racism can translate into oppression, think they must fight fire with fire. As Cornel West says, it is natural for a black person to counter racism with racism. And white people, seeing that black people are also racist, refrain from purging their own attitudes of racist thoughts. Thus neither side of the color line benefits and both sides end up separating form each other...
...Beyond racism, are black people and other political minority groups still oppressed? If you take the indirect and circumstantial route, yes. To look at the preponderance of white males in politics and business--the nexus of power in our society--one can reason, perhaps logically, that the lack of qualified minorities is due to a covert effort, fostered by racism, of keeping minorities out of positions of influence...
...fact, universities are clamoring for minority groups because of their race. The Ku Klux Klan and other race hate groups no longer hold a prominent place in society, if they ever did. No, black people are no longer oppressed, but they sure think they are when they see racism in their lives every day, in the form of police brutality and a legal system that has the tenacious tendency to put one-third of black males in their twenties behind bars...
There is a difference between institutional racism and institutional oppression. Institutional racism, in the guise of Pat Buchanan, inherent in the rhetoric of Charles Murray, and implicit in the image of Willie Horton as the quintessential criminal in America, are words geared at demonizing the black race, provoking other Americans to think of black people as stupid and predisposed to criminal activity. The tools of institutional oppression, in the form of police brutality in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Saint Louis and Chicago, are the sticks and stones which actively hurt the black community and keep it from achieving everything that...