Racism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Racism - Essay Example Patterns of racism keep transforming over time and a more universal definition of racism is "Prejudice or discrimination by one group toward others perceived as a different 'race', plus the power to enforce it." Groups of students may be almost identical physiologically, yet be divided against each other on the basis of culture, language, religion, nationality, or any combination of the above which is not an uncommon experience in schools. Teachers tend to pay more attention to "white" students in the group because subconsciously they relate "white" to etiquette, opulence and high society even though it might not always be true. Prolonged influence of racialised opinions from families and society in general results in preconceived notion which shows up as an attitudinal bias. Whatever the roots of racism may be, it tends to perpetuate itself. A group of students are defined as "lesser" and denied access to resources, then the results of such denial is used to justify defining them as "lesser." "Racism" is never shrugged off. For example, when a White Georgetown Law School student reported earlier this year that black students are not as qualified as White students, it set off a booming, national controversy about "racism." The dogma has logical consequences that are profoundly important. If blacks, for example, are equal to Whites in every way, what accounts for their poverty, criminality, and dissipation Since any theory of racial differences has been outlawed, the only possible explanation for black failure is White racism. And since blacks are markedly poor, crime-prone, and dissipated, the global society must be racked with pervasive racism because nothing else could be keeping them in such an abject state. Racialisation is not a natural concept, rather it was born and perpetuated within the society and the feeling of "color-bias" has been passing over along with genetic material over the generations ever-since. It is argued by socio-biologists and some schools of psychoanalysis that our instincts are programmed to hate those different to us by evolutionary and developmental mechanisms. As the world is turning into a global village, the inter-mixing of cultures is inevitable; hence, the population of children with a mixed ethnicity is on a rise. Racial identity becomes more a matter of concern than it was ever before and the new generation is not paranoid about accepting and even experimenting with different cultural factors like language, food, music and attire. This has been aptly demonstrated in Helen Wullff's research ( South London, 1980) on inter-racial friendships in which a group of teenage girls from different and mixed cultural backgrounds were observed for relationships and p eer acceptance and bonding. On the other hand, any scan of urban or suburban school districts and classrooms will demonstrate that students are still kept unequal along racialized lines; private conversations between teachers, administrators or students clearly demonstrate that race does still factor in to how people treat, fear and relate to each other. It is virtually impossible to fix racial inequality and improve race relations without talking