Racism Is A System Of Advantage Based On Race

Profound and positive changes have occurred in race relations in the United States in the past half century. One now sees blacks working alongside whites, blacks being admitted as equals in theaters and restaurants. Legal restrictions on political and voting rights have been erased and the courts have outlawed segregation (Pascoe, 44).

Racial segregation is defined as the practice of restricting people to a certain area of residence, facilities and institutions like school and churches and it provides a way of maintaining the economic advantages and superior social status of the politically dominant group, and in the past and present times it has been employed primarily to benefit the white population (Pascoe 44). Racism is a system of advantage based on race. This definition helps us see that racism, like other forms of oppression is not only personal ideology based on race prejudice but a system involving cultural messages and institutional policies and practices as well as actions and beliefs of individuals. In America, this system operates to the advantage of whites and disadvantage to people of color.

Jim crow laws were used by majority of American states to enforce segregation. There were separate facilities for people of color and whites (Pascoe, 48). The very fact that there were separate facilities was to say to black people and white people that blacks were subhuman and inferior they could not even use the public facilities that white people used. Segregation of schools was a norm until it was abolished by the federal court case of Brown V Board of Education in 1954(Pascoe, 46). The Brown v Board of Education court case ruled that segregation in schools was in fact unconstitutional and that separate institutions did no...

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...because of discrimination and racism.

Whites benefit from segregation and maintaining segregated neighborhoods feeds prejudice by limiting contacts between different groups of people. This shows that Whites prefer white neighborhoods because they are taught that blacks or Hispanics are inferior," find support for this view in the relatively poor average outcomes for these minority groups, and, be cause of extensive segregation, rarely experience the kind of interracial contact that breaks prejudice down (Carr, 82). The fiction of black inferiority that is at the heart of white prejudice is thus supported by a powerful vicious circle: Prejudice builds on observed disparities in social outcomes, is protected by the lack of contact that goes with segregation, and then supports the continuing discrimination by which these disparities and this segregation are preserved.