Racism As Poor Treatment Of Or Violence - 4883 Words

Racism Webster defines racism as poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race and the belief that some races of people are better than others, this leads to the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capabilities and that racial differences produce a superiority in a particular race. (Webster) With modern thinking and understanding we now know that this is truly not the case. Even in today s society we still have a racial bias towards groups of people. In a classic study a group of people were shown a photograph with a white man fighting another white man who had a knife. After shown the photograph people were able to identify the correct person wielding the knife. When shown another†¦show more content†¦The rationale for the enslavement of other races was based on the bible surprisingly, the slave traders would interpret the book of Genesis, by saying Ham had committed a sin against his father Noah, and he had condemned his bla ck descendants to become servants unto servants. When Virginia decided in 1667 that slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was changed from religious status to something approaching race. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, laws were passed in North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal marriages. Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were inferior. Eighteenth century ethnologists subdivided people into three to five races, usually considered as varieties of a single human species. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, an increasing number of writers, especially those defending slavery, believed that the races constituted separate species. (Frederickson 2003) The Nineteenth century was an age of emancipation, nationalism, and imperialism, all of which contributed to the growth of racism in Europe and the United States. Although the freeing of blacks from