Racism Essay

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Racism is actions, practices or beliefs, or social or political systems that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently (Newman, D. M. (2012). Sociology: exploring the architecture of everyday life (9th ed.). Los Angeles: SAGE. p. 405). According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica the modern meaning of the term race with reference to humans began to emerge in the 17th century. Since then it has had a variety of meanings in the languages of the Western world. What most definitions have in common is an attempt to categorize peoples primarily by their physical differences. While most conceptualizations of racism include the notion of "race based discrimination", the exact definition is controversial both because there is little scholarly agreement about the meaning of the concept "race", and because there is also little agreement about what does and does not constitute discrimination ("Racism" R. Schaefer. 2008 Encyclopaedia of Race, Ethnicity and Society. SAGE. p. 1113). While some argue that any assumption that a person’s behaviour could be categorized according to their race is inherently racist ( http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/mcs/article/view/1075/1605 "Only White People can be Racist": What does Power have to with Prejudice? Pooja Sawrikar and Ilan Katz) J Phillipe Rushton in his book Race, Evolution and Behaviour proposes that certain behavioural patterns are fundamentally race oriented. Among the difficulties on how to define racism are the issue of whether to include forms of unintentional discrimination such as making ...

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... “significant challenges” in schools which among the most socially segregated among the developed world. This creates a hostile environment for all children and it would be more pronounced for migrant children.

Conclusion
In conclusion children are not inherently racist in nature but are highly curious and impressionable. Therefore it is the environment and socio-cultural condition that influence their biases and prejudices. While migrant children would find it challenging to assimilate in to main stream society it is far less pronounced than in adult migrants. As in most biases or prejudices the issue is the fear of the unknown and when the same concern becomes familiar the prejudices also tend to disappear. While most studies are to do with white prejudices towards children from other cultures it is timely to take a look at biases of children without prejudice.

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