It is widely believed that racism remains a major international problem at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The term is used in some countries and in some circles to describe hostility and discrimination directed against a group for virtually any reason. Racism survives even in the carefully delineated sense that has governed the study of its history. The Holocaust and decolonization may have permanently discredited what can be called as overtly racist regimes, but this good news should not be inflated into a belief that racism itself is dead or even dying (Fredrickson 2002). Group inequalities associated with what are taken to be indelible marks of inferior or unworthy ancestry can exist without having the full apparatus of the modern state to sustain them. The legacy of the past racism directed at blacks in the United States is more like a bacillus that people have failed to destroy, a live germ that not only continues to make some people ill but retains the capacity to generate new strains of a disease for which people have no certain cure. If racism is not dead, it is less intense and intellectually respectable than it was a century or even a half-century ago (Fredrickson 2002).
But human beings continue to mistreat other human beings on the basis of their ethnic identities. Although it takes much more than rational persuasion to overcome racism, the fact that its foundations are subject to empirical falsification does make it more fragile than the incontrovertible and unquestioning faith demanded by sectarian or fundamentalist religion. Along with the dissemination of the truth about human physical differences, the struggle against racism also requires that stigmatized groups have enforceable civil rights, political empowerment in proportion to their numbers, and equal opportunity in education and employment (Babbitt & Campbell 1999). In debates about racism within the United States, some take the position that black people cannot be racist and that only white people can be racist. Others hold a very different view. They say that racism is not confined to one group, which members of any ethnic or racial group can be racist against members of any other group, and that racism on the part of blacks is no better or worse than racism on the part of whites. All racism is equal, according to this second view. These two views are sometimes thought to correlate with particular members of racial groups. So, it is said, blacks tend to hold the view that only whites can be racist, whereas whites hold the view that all racism is equal. Both the historical legacy effect and the social disadvantage effect might well be somewhat different than the usual cases of dominant-group racism if the perpetrator is a member of a vulnerable group and the content of the racist message is less reminiscent of dominant group racism perhaps drawing on a racist content more specific to the ethnic culture of the vulnerable group perpetrator than to U.S. culture (Babbitt & Campbell 1999).
The content might then be less evocative of the particular tradition of historical oppression and of the particular racist ideology and imagery that are reflective and justificatory of current relations of advantage and disadvantage. If so, the historical legacy effect and the social disadvantage effect would likely be less powerful (Sue 2003). Racism has been the problem for the society since time immemorial. It has created human conflicts and it caused world wars. Measures have been used by society to counter such problems but it continues to exist in society and in every culture in the world. Racism involves not only the outcast of people not having the same color as the general public, it involves setting aside people with a different culture, tradition or birth place. Racism happens in private and public agencies, entertainment institutions and even in the media. Humans have a natural instinct of concern that another person not belonging to their race may surpass their achievements and steal their group from them. When they feel that the person is better than them, they set them aside. Humans also have the tendency to outcast any person not having the same race as them because they have fears that the other person may have better look than them. The poem We Return Fighting by W.E.B. Dubois talked about the goal for those oppressed to succeed in the color war brought by racists. It tells how they were forced into fighting and what will be the end result of the war. The poem did not offer solutions to contemporary problems because it created a wider gap among races. The visual art Topsy from the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin shows a black person and other black individuals enjoying themselves by one person dancing and the others watching or playing the musical instruments. The visual art did not offer solutions to contemporary problems because it created stereotypes against black people. In current times racial discrimination has been reduced in the US and most parts of the world. There are still some people who discriminate but the focus is not only on the color but on the nationality, sex or religion.
References
Babbitt, SE & Campbell, S (eds.) 1999, Racism and
philosophy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Fredrickson, GM 2002, Racism: a short history, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Sue, D 2003, Overcoming our racism: The journey to
liberation, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
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