Essay Example on The term racism is one of the most Controversial

The term racism is one of the most controversial and ambiguous concepts in the social sciences see Mac Ghaill 1999 Sow 2008 Koller 2009 Fredrickson 2011 Racism is a social relation anchored in material structures and embedded in historical configurations of power Since racism is a complex hierarchical system a structured ensemble of social and institutional practices and discourses individuals do not have actively to express or practice racism to be its beneficiaries Shohat Stam 1995 p 19 There is no generic racism only historically specific racisms each with their own socio temporally specific causes There is no single set of transcendental determinant s that inevitably causes the occurrence of racism be it nature or class formation There are only specific interests and values the cultures out of with racialized discourse and racist expression arise Racisms involve promoting exclusions Goldberg 1993 90 98 Racism is a power relation deployed to maintain domination via hierarchically categorising groups Different accounts of racism in society indicate it is contested and conflicted Racism is no longer about someone's skin colour but culture People are discriminated against not because of the colour of their skin but because of their beliefs and practices Cultural racism therefore happens when certain people perceive their beliefs and customs as being culturally superior to the beliefs and customs of other groups of people Cultural racism in turn reproduces the idea of the hierarchy of cultures Unfortunately racism is very common in our culture both as an institutionalised and systematic system that is used to oppress racially minority groups While legally racism has been illegal for a long period of time now it still happens 

This can be done both intentionally and unintentionally There are some institutions that even promote racism which has hurt many minorities Thankfully there are many solutions that we as a community can implement to help us overcome these problems and make racism something of the past Enoch Powell 195 said rightly Every nation is unique it has its own pastimes memories ways language or way of speaking its own culture In this essay I will be discussing the theory of cultural racism in our generation and how it has had an effect on our societies I will be doing this by focusing on an event that will forever be remembered the London riots that took place in the summer of 2011 which some argue were about race and others argue it was just people with a twisted moral code Cultural racism is not yet a label in the race and racism literature especially in the United States It has only recently appeared in the U S sociological literature Bonilla Silva 2003 It is more common in the European literature Modood 2005 Scholars have argued that race as biology is fiction and that racial classifications are historical and culturally specific ideologies invented to justify slavery and other forms of institutionalised inequality Mukhopadhyay and Henze 2003 Mukhopadhyay Henze and Moses 2007 Margret Thatcher said in her election broadcast in 1978 that People are really afraid that this country will be swamped by people of a different culture if there is any fear that it might be swamped then people are going to be rather hostile to those coming in 

The word racism started to make its first appearance in the early twentieth century The idea however that a certain group of people are superior has been around in the world for a substantial amount of time For example in the 15th and 16th century the African population were considered to be lower in class than any race and the Europeans used them as slaves Even before this racism was evident The Egyptians used the Jewish population as slaves to help them build their famous pyramids with their hard labor in which people were treated disgustingly One of the worst racist events however against an ethnic group was in Germany The slaughtering of millions of Jews Gypsies and Catholics under the command of Hitler will never be forgotten The old racism operates by constructing impassable symbolic boundaries between racially constituted categories and its typically binary system of representation constantly marks and attempts to fix and naturalise the difference between belongingness and otherness Stuart Hall 1988 Stuart Hill also said that this new racism has caused the end of the innocent black subject He says black is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature Hall 1988 He further states The end of the essential black subject entails a recognition that the central issues of race always appear historically in articulation in a formation with other categories and devisions and are constantly crossed and recrossed by the categories of class of gender and ethnicity 1988 The discussion between identity and being black is no longer secure