Racism Every Day
- arcrchk
- Mar 30, 2023
- 2 min read
By: Anu Subramanian Senthilkannan
Before this topic is explored, the definitions of certain terms must be understood. For example, racism. What is it, in the first place? Racism is when a person belonging to a certain ethnic group or of a certain skin colour, usually a minor one, is discriminated against by another person of a superior ethnic group or skin colour. The word “racism” contains “race” in it because it is based on the concept of race. A common misconception is that race and ethnicity are the same. Well, they are not. Race is not real. Race is simply a social construct created to categorize people into various social groups based on genetic and biological differences like skin colour, eye colour, hair, etc. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is the shared cultural practices and customs that set groups apart from each other. While racial differences are inherited, ethnic differences are learned.
But, how did racism come about? While the formation of the United States evolved, the concept of “race” evolved, deeply entangling with the terms, “white” and “slave”. Europeans in the 1500s brought 3 words with them to North America, “race”, “white” and “slave” but then, they had different definitions. It was the American society who changed those words’ definitions. From then, over centuries, the belief that white people were smarter and better than nonwhite people began getting accepted globally. The reason behind the European colonization and enslavement of Africans was this.
Slavery has been used forever, in ancient societies like Greece, Rome and Egypt and even in the Hebrew Bible. The only modern aspect of this term was the fact that only dark people were slaves, and not white people. Similarly, “white” did not refer to the English before the mid-1600s. It was only until 1613 when the English compared themselves to the East Indians. From the 1550s to the 1600s, elite English women were “white” because the paleness of their skin connoted that they did not go out to do work. However, it wasn’t used for English men because that would imply that they were lazy or unproductive. In a nutshell, only Anglo-Saxon people were referred to as “white” but that changed over time and geography. These social inventions began interconnecting and triumphed in uniting the white colonists, marginalizing native people and permanently enslaving most African-descended people for generations.
Racism, discrimination and prejudice has drastically reduced since before, but it has not completely perished. Just last week, in Buffalo, New York, 10 people were killed and 3 people were wounded in a mass shooting. A teenage white gunman of 18 years age entered a grocery store and started methodically shooting people (almost all of them being black). This was labelled one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history. It was also the largest mass shooting to date in the city of Buffalo. Authorities identified the suspect as Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, a small town in New York’s rural areas. He drove more than 200 miles to carry out this attack and livestream it, a chilling video feed.
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