Synthesis Essay On Racism

Patel 1

Kesha Patel

Professor Irvin-Erickson

Synthetic Paper

26 April 2014

Synthetic Essay

How a society builds or comprehends race alters across communities. Racism has been a critical issue for a long time in our society and while actions have been taken to prevent it, it is a controversial issue as to whether racism can be avoided or not. The belief that black people are human beings is a new discovery in the Modern West. The concept of black equality in beauty, culture, and intellectual capacity remains questionable and controversial within important halls of learning and cultured intellectual circles. The African Americans confrontation with the modernized world has been formed first and foremost by the principle of white dominance, which is demonstrated in institutionalized practices and achieved in everyday cultures under different circumstances and developing conditions. The Historical learning of racial thoughts and approach has frequently been improper by the impulsive present day. Earlier writers are held up to disdain without any acceptable attempts to locate their understanding within the circumstances of the ability available to their generation. Modern writers all too easily disregard the alteration in the meaning connect to the word “race” (Banton pg 51). We rarely view modernity through the lens of the enslaved and their descendants-yet we fail to do so at our peril. (West)

Cornel West gives a brief history of the way in which the belief of white dominance was established as an object of modernized communication in the west, without simply engaging to the objective demands of the predominant mode of production, the political concern of the

Patel 2 slaveholding class or the psycholog...

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...In regard to ideals of beauty, he notes that Herodotus called Ethiopians the most handsome people on earth; Philostratus spoke of charming Ethiopians with their strange color; Pseudo-Callisthenes held the black Queen of Meroe to be of wondrous beauty; and the poet Martial, pursued by a woman whiter than snow, wanted a “super-black” woman. Snowden goes as far as to state:” On the whole… the number of expressed preferences for blackness and whiteness in classical literature is approximately equal (West Pg. 85).

The idea of white dominance is a major bowel discharged by the form of modern discourse, a meaningful secretion achieved from the ingenious mixture of scientific investigation, Cartesian philosophy and classical beauty and cultural norms. Needless to say the odor of this bowel and the fumes of this secretion continue to pollute the air of our postmodern times.