Buchi Emecheta's Second-Class Citizen

1488 Words3 Pages

Race and ethnic roots have been a core phenomenon which determine the human relations since the beginning of first civilizations to today’s contemporary world. Until the 19th century, race had a usage in the meaning of ‘nation’ but after that time it also started to be used for ‘blacks and whites’ and even for Muslims and Jews at the last century. But what were the aim of this difference and what were the reasons behind it? It is quite simple. With the occurrence of the French Revolution, a new idea-nationalism- has come up and started to affect all the countries; especially empires. By the extension of nationalistic ideas over the countries, all the leaders used their people’s race and nation as a symbol of unity and imposed the feeling of supreme-nation is theirs and people started to believe it. As a result of this, people began to see other people inferior. This was the general case and many people affected by this race discrimination but not as much as black people. Since the beginning of colonization, black people have always become the center of these racist thoughts. Buchi Emecheta, an African writer, is one of these black people who is exposed racism and race discrimination. In her book, she wrote about a Nigerian girl, Adah, who went to United Kingdom and faced a lot of racist situations. This essay will explain what happened to Adah and why this event should be seen as racism by using Marxist and Weberian theories of race. But first, causes and results of racism will be mentioned to understand this issue much better.
“Racism is generally defined as actions, practices or beliefs, or social or political systems that are based in views that see the human species to be divided into races with shared traits, abilities, or...

... middle of paper ...

...what Weber said and because of this it is simply racism.

Works Cited

1. Anthias, Floya and Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1992. Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. London and New York: Routledge.
2. Emecheta, B. 1994. Second-class citizen. Oxford: Heinemann.
3. Ibn Khaldun and Rosenthal, F. 1958. The Muqaddimah. New York: Pantheon Books.
4. ‘Racism and Nationalism’, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso: 37–67.
5. Rex, J. 1986. Race and ethnicity. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press.
6. Schaefer, R. 2008. Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Society. SAGE.
7. Spencer, S. 2006. Race and ethnicity. London: Routledge.
8. Voegelin, Eric. 1933a. [2000]. Race and State. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press (trans. Ruth Heim).

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