COLEGIUL NAȚIONAL „TEODOR NEȘ” SALONTA

LUCRARE DE ATESTAT DE COMPETENȚE LINGVISTICE LA

LIMBA ENGLEZĂ

Profesor coordonator: Elev:

Țirban Laura-Patricia Kiraly Rebeca

SALONTA
2018
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 COLEGIUL NAȚIONAL „TEODOR NEȘ” SALONTA

ABOUT RACISM

Profesor coordonator: Elev:

Țirban Laura-Patricia Kiraly Rebeca
SALONTA
2018
2
 CONTENTS

I. Introduction

1. What is ”racism”? 4

II. Forms of racism

1. Different types………………………………………………………...5

2. Individual and systemic racism 7

III. A brief history of racism

1. Why did it start………………………………………………………..8

2. When did it start………………………………………………………8

3. How did it start………………………………………………………10

IV. Personalities

1. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi……………………………………..11

2. Rosa Parks…………………………………………………………...13

3. Martin Luther King Jr. 15

V. Conclusion and personal opinion………………………………………………….....17

VI. Bibliography 19

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 I. Introduction
1. What is ”racism”?
I’m going to start with giving the formal definition of the word “racism”:

“racism/ˈreɪsɪz(ə)m/noun =prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of

a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.”

Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another, which often
results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. Today, the
use of the term "racism" does not easily fall under a single definition.While the concepts of race
and ethnicity are considered to be separate in contemporary social science, the two terms have a
long history of equivalence in both popular usage and older social science literature. "Ethnicity"
is often used in a sense close to one traditionally attributed to "race": the division of human
groups based on qualities assumed to be essential or innate to the group (e.g. shared ancestry or
shared behavior). Therefore, racism and racial discrimination are often used to describe
discrimination on an ethnic or cultural basis, independent of whether these differences are

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described as racial.

II. Forms of racism

1. Different types

Reverse racism is arguably the hottest form of racism in the 21st century. It’s not that reverse
racism is a huge problem in the U.S., it’s that people keep claiming they’ve been victims of this
form of racism in which whites fall prey to discrimination.So, do whites ever face racial bias?
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided so in a few landmark cases, such as when white firefighters
in New Haven, Conn., were prohibited from being promoted because their minority counterparts
didn’t qualify for promotions as well.All in all, however, whites are rarely on the receiving end

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of racial discrimination. As a growing number of states ban affirmative action, it has become
even harder for whites to say they’ve been reverse racism victims.

Subtle racism, or racial microaggressions, doesn’t make the headlines that, say, reverse racism
does, but it’s likely the form of discrimination that people of color most often experience.Victims
of subtle, or covert, racism may find themselves snubbed by wait staff in restaurants or
salespeople in stores who believe that people of color aren’t likely to be good tippers or able to
afford anything expensive, as Oprah Winfrey has described about a shopping experience
abroad.Targets of subtle racism may find that supervisors, landlords, etc., apply different rules to
them than they do to others. An employer might run a thorough background check on an
applicant of color, while accepting a job applicant from a prospective white employee with no
additional documentation.

In a society in which blonde hair and blue eyes are still widely regarded as ideal and stereotypes
about minority groups persist, it’s not hard to see why some people of color suffer from
internalized racism. In this form of racism, people of color internalize the negative messages
spread about minorities and come to loathe themselves for being “different.” They may hate their
skin color, their hair texture and other physical features or intentionally marry interracially so
their children won’t have the same ethnic traits that they do. They may simply suffer from low
self-esteem because of their race—performing poorly in school or in the workplace because they
believe their racial background makes them inferior. Michael Jackson was long accused of
suffering from this kind of racism because of the changing color of his skin and plastic surgeries.

Colorismis often viewed as a problem that’s unique to communities of color. It occurs when
minorities discriminate against those with darker skin than they have. For years in the black
community, lighter skin was viewed as superior to darker skin. Anyone with skin color that was
lighter than a brown paper lunch bag was welcomed into elite organizations in the black
community, while darker skinned blacks were excluded. But colorism doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
It’s a direct offshoot of a white supremacist ideology that values whites over people of color and
equips Caucasians with what’s known as white skin privilege. Colorism also exists outside of the
African-American community. In Asia, sales of skin whitening products remain sky high.

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 THE “QUEEN OF THE DARK” WHO WAS TOLD TO BLEACH HER SKIN

2. Individual and systemic racism

"It was just a personal opinion. "

"I was just doing my job, and following procedure."

"Anyone can apply for that job."

"Anyone can play hockey or take music lessons in this city."

Racism occurs between individuals, on an interpersonal level, and is embedded in organizations

and institutions through their policies, procedures and practices. In general, it may seem easier to

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recognize individual or interpersonal acts of racism: a slur made, a person ignored in a social or
work setting, an act of violence. However, "individual" racism is not created in a vacuum but
instead emerges from a society's foundational beliefs and ‘ways' of seeing/doing things, and is
manifested in organizations, institutions, and systems (including education).

Systemic Racism includes the policies and practices entrenched in established institutions,
which result in the exclusion or promotion of
designated groups. It differs from overt discrimination
in that no individual intent is necessary. (Toronto
Mayor's Committee on Community and Race
Relations.

Individual racism refers to an individual's racist

assumptions, beliefs or behaviours and is a form of
racial discrimination that stems from conscious and
unconscious, personal prejudice.Individual Racism is
connected to/learned from broader socio-economic
histories and processes and is supported and reinforced
by systemic racism.

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 III. A brief history of racism

1. Why did it start

Any discussion of racism needs to examine the roots of racism in order to understand it and to
struggle against it effectively. There are basically three explanations for the existence of racism.

The dominant view which is rarely expressed as a worked out theory but rather operates at the
level of assumptions is that racism is an irrational response to difference which cause some
people with white skin to have hateful attitudes to people with black skin which sometimes leads
to violent and evil actions. People who have this understanding of racism usually advocate
awareness and education as a way of preventing the practice of racism..

The second view is that racism is endemic in white society and that the only solution is for black
people to organise "themselves separately from whites " in order to defend themselves and to
protect their interests.

The third view and the one which libertarian communists and social anarchists advocate is an
explanation of racism based on a materialist perspective, which views racism as a historically
specific and materially caused phenomenon.

2. When did it start

However, historical references indicate that class society before capitalism was able, on the
whole, to do without this particular form of oppression. Bad as the society of classical Greece
and Rome were it is historically reasonably well documented that the ancient Greeks and
Romans knew nothing about race. Slaves were both black and white and in fact the majority of
slaves were white.

The first clear evidence of racism occurred at the end of the 16th century with the start of the
slave trade from Africa to Britain and to America. CLR James in his Modern Politics writes that
“the conception of dividing people by race begins with its slave trade. Thus this [the slave trade]
was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religious and philosophers
had . . .the only justifications by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races
and decide that Africans were an inferior “race".

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So racism was formed by the rich and powerful as an attempt to justify the most appalling and
inhuman treatment of black people in the time of the greatest accumulation of material wealth
the world had seen until then. By the end of the 17th century, racism had become an established,
systematic and conscious justification for the most degrading forms of slavery.

Racism is a SIN problem, not a SKIN problem.

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 3. How did it start

In Europe

During the 19th century, European countries saw Africa’s richness in natural resources and
decided that it would be a great place to conquer and colonize. Each European country raced to
the continent and treated it like a huge buffet table; but perhaps forgot to ask Africa“Are you
going to eat that?” The theft of the land included our heritage, resources, history, and was
possibly the reason for the rest of the worst events listed.

After all this, Europeans then decided they needed people to work for them, but for FREE.
Enslaved Africans were the first type of slaves in history to be owned by law, and were treated as
property that could be sold, beaten, or killed at owners consent. Slavery stripped Black people of
common human rights, tore apart societies, and is one of the worst events to ever happen to a
group of people.

In the United States of America

Racism in the United States has been widespread since the colonial era. Legally or socially
sanctioned privileges and rights were given to white Americans but denied to all other
races.According to estimates in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, between 1626 and 1860
more than 470,000 slaves were forcibly transported from Africa to what is now the United
States.Prior to the Civil War, eight serving presidents owned slaves, a practice protected by the
U.S. Constitution. Providing wealth for the white elite, approximately one Southern family in
four held slaves prior to the Civil War. According to the 1860 U.S. census, there were about
385,000 slave owners out of a white population in the slave states of approximately 7 million.

We Cater to White Trade Only" sign on a restaurant window in Lancaster,

Ohio in 1938. In 1964 Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and spent a night
in jail for attempting to eat at a white-only restaurant in St. Augustine,
Florida.

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 IV. Personalities
1. Mohandas Karamchand
Gandhi

Born in India and educated in England, Gandhi

traveled to South Africa in early 1893 to
practice law under a one-year contract. Settling
in Natal, he was subjected to racism and South African laws that restricted the rights of Indian
laborers. Gandhi later recalled one such incident, in which he was removed from a first-class
railway compartment and thrown off a train, as his moment of truth. From thereon, he decided to
fight injustice and defend his rights as an Indian and a man.

When his contract expired, he spontaneously decided to remain in South Africa and launch a
campaign against legislation that would deprive Indians of the right to vote. He formed the Natal
Indian Congress and drew international attention to the plight of Indians in South Africa. In
1906, the Transvaal government sought to further restrict the rights of Indians, and Gandhi
organized his first campaign of satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience. After seven years of
protest, he negotiated a compromise agreement with the South African government.

In 1914, Gandhi returned to India and lived a life of abstinence and spirituality on the periphery
of Indian politics. He supported Britain in the First World War but in 1919 launched a new
satyagraha in protest of Britain’s mandatory military draft of Indians. Hundreds of thousands
answered his call to protest, and by 1920 he was leader of the Indian movement for
independence. Always nonviolent, he asserted the unity of all people under one God and
preached Christian and Muslim ethics along with his Hindu teachings. The British authorities
jailed him several times, but his following was so great that he was always released.

After World War II, he was a leading figure in the negotiations that led to Indian independence in
1947. Although hailing the granting of Indian independence as the “noblest act of the British
nation,” he was distressed by the religious partition of the former Mogul Empire into India and
Pakistan. When violence broke out between Hindus and Muslims in India in 1947, he resorted to

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fasts and visits to the troubled areas in an effort to end India’s religious strife. On January 30,
1948, he was on one such prayer vigil in New Delhi when he was fatally shot by
NathuramGodse, a Hindu extremist who objected to Gandhi’s tolerance for the Muslims.

Known as Mahatma, or “the great soul,” during his lifetime, Gandhi’s persuasive methods of
civil disobedience influenced leaders of civil rights movements around the world, especially
Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States.

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 2. Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913, to
Leona (née Edwards), a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter. In addition to African
ancestry, one of her great-grandfathers was Scots-Irish and one of her great-grandmothers was a
Native American slave.[5][6] She was small as a child and suffered poor health with chronic
tonsillitis. When her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Pine Level, just outside the
state capital, Montgomery. She grew up on a farm with her maternal grandparents, mother, and
younger brother Sylvester. They all were members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church
(AME), a century-old independent black denomination founded by free blacks in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, in the early nineteenth century.

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F.
Blake's order to give up her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger, after the whites-
only section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the NAACP
believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for
civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. Parks' prominence in the community
and her willingness to become a controversial figure inspired the black community to boycott the
Montgomery buses for over a year, the first major direct action campaign of the post-war civil
rights movement. Her case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery
bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle succeeded in November 1956.

Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the
movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized
and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter
of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in Montgomery who gained national
prominence in the civil rights movement.

At the time, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. She had recently
attended the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee center for training activists for workers' rights
and racial equality. She acted as a private citizen "tired of giving in". Although widely honored in

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later years, she also suffered for her act; she was fired from her job as a seamstress in a local
department store, and received death threats for years afterwards.

Shortly after the boycott, she moved to Detroit, where she briefly found similar work. From 1965
to 1988 she served as secretary and receptionist to John Conyers, an African-American US
Representative. She was also active in the Black Power movement and the support of political
prisoners in the US.

After retirement, Parks wrote her autobiography and continued to insist that the struggle for
justice was not over and there was more work to be done.[4] In her final years, she suffered from
dementia. Parks received national recognition, including the NAACP's 1979 Spingarn Medal, the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the
United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first woman
and third non-US government official to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. California and
Missouri commemorate Rosa Parks Day on her birthday February 4, while Ohio and Oregon
commemorate the occasion on the anniversary of the day she was arrested, December 1.

In 1992, Parks published Rosa Parks: My Story, an autobiography aimed at younger readers,
which recounts her life leading to her decision to keep her seat on the bus. A few years later, she
published Quiet Strength (1995), her memoir, which focuses on her faith.

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 3. Martin Luther King Jr.

King was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr.
and Alberta Williams King. King's legal name at birth was Michael King, and his father was also
born Michael King, but the elder King changed both his and his son's names around 1934. The
elder King would later state that "Michael" was a mistake by the attending physician to his son's
birth,and the younger King's birth certificate was altered to read "Martin Luther King Jr." in
1957. King's parents were both African-American, and he also had Irish ancestry through his
paternal great-grandfather.

Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and
activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from
1954 until his death in 1968. He is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence
and civil disobedience, tactics his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma
Gandhi helped inspire.

King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and in 1957 became the first president of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). With the SCLC, he led an unsuccessful 1962
struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the nonviolent 1963
protests in Birmingham, Alabama. He also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington,
where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through
nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches. The
following year, he and the SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated
housing. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the
Vietnam War. He alienated many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond
Vietnam". J. Edgar Hoover considered him a radical and made him an object of the FBI's
COINTELPRO from 1963 on. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded
his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion
mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him
commit suicide.

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In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor
People's Campaign, when he was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4 in Memphis,
Tennessee; riots followed in many U.S. cities. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was
established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal
holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in
Washington State was also rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the
National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

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 V. Conclusion and personal opinion

For me, racism is something that makes me uncomfortable to talk about. It saddens me to know
that there are people in the world who hate other people just because of the color of their skin.
It’s even worse when there are children whose parents are teaching them to hate people for the
color of their skin. People should not judge each other for the color of their skin. Whenever I
hear about police officers shooting black men, I never know what to say or how to react. Its
disappointing knowing that racism will never die off or that people would continue to judge each
other based on skin color. It makes me sad knowing that future children and children today
would have to grow up feeling disliked by other races just because of their skin.

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 Racism is one of the world's major issues today. Many people are not aware of how
much racism still exists in our schools workforces, and anywhere else where social lives are
occurring. It is obvious that racism is bad as it was many decades ago but it sure has not gone
away. Racism very much exists and it is about time that people need to start thinking about the
instigations and solutions to this matter. Many people believe that it depends on if a person was
brought into the world as a racist or not but that is not the case at all. In fact, an individual cannot
be born a racist but only learn to become one as they grow from child to adulthood. Basic causes,
mainstream, institutions, government, anti racism groups, and even some hidden events in
Canada's past are a few of the possible instigations and solutions to racism.

Racism is one of the most revolting things within the vicinity of humanity. There are many types
of causes of racism. Ignorance is the main cause of racism. People who are ignorance will
become a racist because they are lack of knowledge and have old thinking. Lacking of
knowledge when it comes to another race is not something to be embarrassed but if despising
other races without even making an attempt to discover them is shameful.

Racism can make a person die without any notice. The effect of racism on American prison
population can cause the society to be in a state of chaos. The ex-prisoner will discriminate by
the society and knife/gun crimes will happen easily by them. The effect of racism on the victims
is they will be panic easily and feel despair about their live and this may cause them to commit
suicide.

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 VI. Bibliography

1. https://www.ukessays.com/dissertation/research-project/the-world-wide-problem-of-
racism-sociology.php
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/
3. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gandhis-first-act-of-civil-disobedience
4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/03/what-did-mahatma-
gandhi-think-of-black-people/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e194d2172a2a
5. https://ro.pinterest.com/
6. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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