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103 Race Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Race is a complex and sensitive topic that has been at the forefront of discussions for centuries. From systemic racism to cultural appropriation, race plays a significant role in shaping our society and the way we interact with one another. If you are looking for essay topic ideas on race, here are 103 examples to help you get started:

• The history of racism in America
• The impact of colonialism on race relations
• White privilege and its effects on society
• The role of race in the criminal justice system
• Racism in the workplace
• The intersectionality of race and gender
• The portrayal of race in the media
• The effects of racial profiling
• Colorism within communities of color
• The role of race in education
• Interracial relationships and their challenges
• The cultural appropriation of minority groups
• The impact of race on mental health
• The history of affirmative action
• Racial disparities in healthcare
• The stereotypes associated with different racial groups
• The role of race in politics
• The representation of race in literature
• The effects of gentrification on minority communities
• The role of race in sports
• The experience of being a person of color in a predominantly white community
• The impact of race on social mobility
• The role of race in shaping identity
• The effects of racism on mental health
• The history of racial segregation
• The portrayal of race in popular culture
• The impact of race on access to resources
• The representation of race in art
• The effects of racial microaggressions
• The role of race in shaping beauty standards
• The impact of race on voting rights
• The portrayal of race in advertising
• The effects of race-based trauma
• The role of race in shaping political ideologies
• The representation of race in video games
• The impact of race on environmental justice
• The effects of race on access to affordable housing
• The history of race-based discrimination in the legal system
• The portrayal of race in historical monuments
• The role of race in shaping immigration policies
• The impact of race on access to quality education
• The representation of race in fashion
• The effects of racial disparities in the criminal justice system
• The role of race in shaping reproductive rights
• The portrayal of race in social media
• The impact of race on access to healthcare
• The effects of race on access to clean water
• The history of race-based violence
• The role of race in shaping economic opportunities
• The representation of race in music
• The impact of race on access to technology
• The effects of racial disparities in the foster care system
• The role of race in shaping environmental policies
• The portrayal of race in reality TV shows
• The impact of race on access to transportation
• The effects of race on access to healthy food options
• The history of race-based hate crimes
• The role of race in shaping international relations
• The representation of race in comic books
• The impact of race on access to mental health services
• The effects of racial disparities in the juvenile justice system
• The role of race in shaping social movements
• The portrayal of race in online communities
• The impact of race on access to reproductive healthcare
• The effects of race on access to childcare services
• The history of race-based housing discrimination
• The role of race in shaping cultural norms
• The representation of race in theater
• The impact of race on access to legal services
• The effects of racial disparities in the education system
• The role of race in shaping family dynamics
• The portrayal of race in animated films
• The impact of race on access to public transportation
• The effects of race on access to affordable childcare
• The history of race-based employment discrimination
• The role of race in shaping religious beliefs
• The representation of race in documentaries
• The impact of race on access to affordable housing
• The effects of racial disparities in the healthcare system
• The role of race in shaping cultural traditions
• The portrayal of race in video games
• The impact of race on access to affordable childcare
• The effects of race on access to public transportation

When choosing a topic on race, it is important to consider your own perspective and experiences. By exploring these essay topic ideas, you can gain a deeper understanding of how race shapes our society and the ways in which we can work towards a more equitable and inclusive future.

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Ideas of Race and Racism in History

About this episode, youtube video.

• Nicholas Breyfogle

Guests Alice L. Conklin Hasan Kwame Jeffries Robin Judd Deondre Smiles

The issues of race and racism remain as urgent as ever to our national conversation. Four scholars discuss such questions as: Since Race does not exist as a biological reality, what then is race and where did the idea develop from? What is racism? How have race and racism been used by societies to justify discrimination, oppression, and social exclusion? How did racism manifest in different national and historical contexts? How have American and World history in the modern eras been defined by ideas of race and the power hierarchies embedded in racism?

• Nicholas Breyfogle | Associate Professor, Department of History; Director, Goldberg Center, The Ohio State University
• Alice Conklin | Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, Department of History, The Ohio State University
• Robin Judd | Associate Professor, Department of History, The Ohio State University
• Hasan Jeffries | Associate Professor, Department of History, The Ohio State University
• Deondre Smiles | Ph.D. Geography '20; Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada

This content is made possible, in part, by Ohio Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this content do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Cite this Site

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

Hello, and welcome to Ideas of Race and Racism in History brought to you by the history department Clio Society, the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University and by the Bexley Public Library. My name is Nick Breyfogle. I'm an associate professor of history and director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, and I'll be your host and moderator today. Thank you for joining us. The issues of race and racism have a long history in the United States and around the world, and they remain as urgent as ever to our national conversation. Today we'll take part in the discussion among four scholars, Alice Conklin, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Deondre Smiles, and Robin Judd. We'll explore the ways in which understanding the history of race and racism can help us as we navigate these issues today. They'll discuss such questions as, since race doesn't exist as a biological reality, what is race? And where did the idea develop from? And when, for that matter also? How have race and racism been used by societies to justify discrimination, oppression and social exclusion? And how does racism manifest in different national historical contexts? However, American and world history in the modern era has been defined by ideas of race and the power hierarchies embedded in racism. With that introduction, let me lay out the plan. Each of our panelists will speak for a few minutes on questions of race and racism, historically, each exploring a different topic. And I'll introduce them before they speak. Then, they will take your questions, and we'll open things up for discussion. If you're interested in asking a question, please write it in the Q&A function just at the bottom of your screen at any time. We received several questions in advance when people signed up and registered, and we'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can in the time we have. Now, let's begin with Dr. Alice Conklin, who will discuss the science of race and how race developed as a scientific concept. Dr. Conklin is a professor of history at The Ohio State University, and a cultural, political and intellectual historian of modern France and its empire with the focus on the 20th century. She's currently working on a transnational history of French anti-racism between 1945 and 1965. Let me hand the microphone over to you, Alice.

Dr. Alice Conklin 

Thank you, Nick. First, a big thanks to the Origins team who came up with the idea of having this webinar. I will briefly speak about the modern history of the idea of race in the West, and particularly the role that colonialism and science together played in creating and perpetuating what we can agree is a bad, but powerful idea. And race is not just a bad but powerful idea. It is also in the long sweep of history, a relatively recent invention. Those in a nutshell will be my themes today, in these brief remarks, that the very idea of race was invented in the West quite recently, that it is pernicious, and that it remains powerful. When we understand how the very idea of different races came into existence. We understand, in part, why racism remains so difficult to dislodge. The history of the idea of race in the West is a huge topic. To tackle it in the five minutes I have, I want to make three main points.

These are first, the idea of race as something biologically real came into existence first as a folk idea and then as a scientific one. This idea was arguably the greatest error modern Western science ever made. Second, the scientific idea of race was an error because it was based on three false premises. These were one that biologically distinct races existed in nature. Two that some races were more intelligent than others. And three, these races could be classified and ranked from superior to inferior, according to the typical brain shape, weight, or size for each so-called race. In these scientific classifications, white Caucasians were always on top, black groups on the bottom. My third point today will be that many reputable scientists clung to these flawed premises and kept trying to classify and rank peoples long after their own best evidence began showing that their hypotheses were wrong. In so doing, these experts gave the backing, the prestige, the authority of science, to the most vicious prejudices circulating in society. Let me begin with a few facts. Traditionally, we answer the question of how did the race idea begin by looking at the history of colonial expansion into the Americas. When Europeans first crossed the Atlantic, they viewed Indigenous peoples as nations, not races. By the mid-17th Century, however, colonial leaders had relegated Africans alone to a status of permanent slavery. In order to justify this new colonial form of slavery, planters in places like Virginia helped to pioneer informally a new idea, that of race. Colonial leaders began to homogenize all Europeans, regardless of ethnicity, or status or social class, into a single novel category. White people of African descent were similarly homogenized into the category of black. In this system, physical features became markers of social status. Historians call this informal idea of race, a folk idea of race. There was nothing scientific about it. Yet of race ideology developed as a folk idea, it was soon imported into science, or to be more precise, it was imported into the scientific outlook, known as the enlightenment. In other words, the first modern scientists did not invent the race concept. Slave-based colonialism had already done that. But by the end of the 18th century, enlightened naturalist turned to science to rationalize the inhumanity of slavery that had developed in the Americas. These thinkers began arguing that nature itself provided a justification for this new social order that granted privileges to all whites, and relegated Africans to perpetual servitude.

Enlightenment scientists soon eagerly took up a whole series of questions with race at their center. They asked questions like, are all races fully human? Are all races equal? They also gave themselves the task of ranking the races of humankind on the basis of intelligence. Since classification was considered the basis of all good science. None of them questioned the biological reality of races or the superiority of white Europeans as establishing these rankings became the basis of a new professional discipline, anthropology where the science of humanity, the 19th century, saw the full flowering of the science. And it was science in the sense that it met the best scientific standards of the day. The science, moreover, leached out into society. Thanks to the invention of photography, of museums, of the penny press, and the violent colonization of Africa and large parts of Asia that took place over the course of the 19th century, the race classifications that appeared in scientific journals became fatally easy to disseminate visually to a wider public. People became used to seeing images of beauty and intelligence that correlated with whiteness, other so-called races of the world might be presented as noble, or romantic. Certainly, they were exotic, but they were always presented as inferior, a view that the best science of the day endorsed. Alas, many of these images are still with us.

Let me now fast forward. By the end of World War II, for complex reasons, science began to correct itself and abandon the belief that race was biologically real, and that races could be placed in a fairly firm racial hierarchy. Scientists today of course, recognize that there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks, or all whites. To conclude, science in the West managed for a long time to convince ordinary people that race was biologically real, when it wasn't and isn't. human races are not biological units. Races are social constructs. Human race exists solely because we humans created them, and only in the forms in which we perpetuate them. Historically, race has never been just a matter of creating categories of people. It has always been a matter of creating hierarchies. And when it came to creating racial hierarchies, Western colonialism and Western science have a lot to answer for. Thank you.

Thank you, Alice very much for those great introductory remarks and really fascinating inspiration of the kind of origins of the modern ideas of race and racism. Our next panelist is Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries who will speak to us today about race and the black experience in American history. Dr. Jeffries is an associate professor of history in the Department of History at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on the African American freedom struggle. He's the editor of the award-winning collection of essays, Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement  He earned his B.A. from Morehouse College, his Ph.D. from Duke University. I'll pass you over to Hasan now. Thank you.

Dr. Hasan Jeffries 

Well, thank you very much, Nick. It is a real delight and pleasure to be able to be a part of this conversation, especially at this particular moment in time, I just want to go ahead and jump right into my remarks. I'm so glad that we left off with Dr. Conklin laying out the basic groundwork that this idea of race just simply isn't real. It is not real  in a biological sense. But at the same time, as she pointed out, it is socially meaningful, so biologically meaningless, but socially meaningful, because it has structured global society for the last 500, 600 years. And it all, it is also culturally relevant. Because we use race today and have used it certainly in the American context, as a stand in for cultural heritage, and for cultural ancestry. Which is why we cannot pretend as though race itself isn't a meaningful, impactful construct in the lives of all people, and certainly all Americans.

But while race isn't biologically real, racism is absolutely real. And it has deep roots in the American experience, and has shaped the lives of all Americans dating back to the founding of this nation, and the original colonial endeavor. 1619. We've heard so much about 1619 over the last year or so, last two years. 1619 marks the year in which the first group of enslaved Africans were brought to British North America, brought to Virginia and that really is an important moment in what would become the American journey. Because a decision is made or choices made to embrace the enslavement of people based on, for economic necessity, for economical, rather economic advantage, exploitation based on this idea of race. And so we see at this moment in 1619, that literally embedded in our DNA as what will become a nation, or is racism, intertwined with capitalism. I mean, that is literally in our DNA, because it serves as a justification for the enslavement of this critical labor force. It also serves as justification for the taking of land for those who were already present here. It is the justification for what would be the institution of slavery that would last for two-and-a-half centuries.

In America, we also see that racism is embedded in our founding documents, the 1776 Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, who absolutely says all men are created equal. But that's because he does not have to qualify it with a racial qualifier. He does not have to say all white people, because he knows, everyone knows he's just talking about white men. He doesn't have to say all white men, because everyone knows he's not talking about women. Thomas Jefferson has a very rich history with the colorline and is one of the people in America who really lays the groundwork for a scientific rationalization of what racism was. So we see it embedded in our founding documents.

Same way with the Constitution, the father of it is James Madison, a person who, like Jefferson, enslaved 100 or so people over the course of his lifetime and never freed a single soul. So we see it embedded in our founding documents. Now there are times such as here in Ohio, it comes into the union, that we think we are on the right side of history. Ohio comes into the union and 1803 and rejects the institution of slavery, but not because it rejected the idea of racism, not because the those white men who were in the, who brought Ohio into the union, rejected white supremacy. They just didn't want black people here. So there are times when we see we are on the right side of history as a nation. But for the wrong reasons, racism and white supremacy specifically, was something that really impacted the entire nation. When we get to the Civil War, which was absolutely fought about maintaining the institution of slavery in the states where it existed, and having the opportunity to expand it in the places where it wasn't. For the West, we see that once that battle is over, racism doesn't end. In fact, the principal legacy of the institution of slavery, North and South was the persistence in the belief in of white supremacy.

And so we see that white supremacy as a shared national ideology would go on into the late 19th Century, early 20th Century, serving as the justification for the for new systems of labor, exploitation of African Americans, that being Jim Crow, and all of it is enforced by violence. And so we also see in this moment of the 20th century, just as violence was a cornerstone of the institution of slavery, violence was the cornerstone of the new freedom. And so this becomes the era of lynching. And all of it is justified by these myths connected to race, whether it's black criminality, or black brutality, right? It all connects to this idea that somehow dark skin, darker skin, non-European ancestry leads to this inherent danger among African Americans or by African Americans. We also see as we move into the 20th century, during the era of Jim Crow, and just one more to two more quick comments, that we see how racism becomes embedded in our broader society. Whether we're talking about the criminal justice system and convict leasing, whether we're talking about homeownership in the New Deal, whether we're talking about segregated schools, these aren't just personal decisions that are being made by white folk in America. These are systems that are put in place, that are designed to disadvantage African Americans for the purpose of providing basic privileges for white Americans.

In 1965 1964, the Civil Rights Movement does not end racism in America. It certainly does outlaw and end legal racial discrimination. But just as white supremacy continued after slavery, a belief in white supremacy, a belief in racism continued after the Civil Rights era. Now the language that we use certainly changes by individuals, and we move into this era of colorblind legislation, but we still see purposeful actions and intent in legislation and business decisions and the like. But we also see the legacy of racism being the implicit biases that we harbor. And so even if we were to eliminate thoughtful or purposeful racial discrimination on the part of some, we still internalize this legacy of racist beliefs, not because we were born, anyone in this world was born racist, or harboring racist views, but because we were born in a society that normalizes racism and racist views. That is the problem. We haven't fundamentally changed that. So I'll just end simply by saying we are in the midst of a national conversation and national debate which we think we need to be having about whether or not we should be talking about race or racism. And the answer to that is a simple absolutely, because both race and racism continue to shape the contours of the lives of every single person. And you cannot understand the problems that we face as a society today, unless we take seriously race and racism, just as we can't understand the problems of yesterday, unless we understand race and racism, and the role of race and racism. And we certainly can't solve the problems that our children are going to be facing in the future unless we take seriously the role of race and racism in society. So thank you very much, and I turn it back over to Nick.

Thank you very much, Hasan. Our next speaker is Dr. Deondre Smiles, who'll discuss issues of race and racism in the context of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples. Dr. Smiles is a member of the Lekwungen Band of Ojibwe. He is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Smiles' research centers around conversations of the political role of the Indigenous deceased in relationships between Indigenous communities and the state. Smiles also has broader interests in critical Indigenous geographies, political ecology, science and technology studies and tribal cultural resource preservation. Smiles earned his Ph.D. in geography from the Ohio State University, where he also spent a year as a President's Postdoctoral Scholar in the history department. I'll pass the floor over to Deondre.

Dr. Deondre Smiles 

I'm muted. There we go. Thank you so much, Nick. I, in a typical academic fashion, I have made a short PowerPoint that I will share for you all, very quick. I'll make sure to keep myself within five minutes. So I'll share that. Alright, and we'll turn the subtitles off. There we go. So hello, everyone. As Dr. Breyfogle mentioned, my name is Dr. Deondre Smiles. I'm a citizen of the  Lekwungen Band of Ojibwe, which is a tribal nation located in north central Minnesota, about 200 miles north northwest of Minneapolis. I'm an assistant professor, newly minted assistant professor, here in the Department of Geography up in, we call it beautiful British Columbia right now. As I look out my living room window, it's a little cloudy as it is fall here. As you mentioned, I did a Ph.D. from 2016 to 2020 in geography at OSU and then I stayed for a year as a postdoc before moving to Canada. I'm so, I'm pleased to be with you all today. And as usually is the custom whenever we do anything up here in Victoria academically, I want to just briefly acknowledge and respect the Lekwungen peoples, whose traditional territory I'm presenting from today, as well as Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ, seen as peoples whose historical relationships with this land continue to the state. So in order to give this justice, we probably wouldn't need several hours. But in five minutes, I'll briefly talk about the ways that indigenous histories oftentimes get obscured in the ways that we teach it and the ways that we learn about it. And so I start off by showing this map, or this is a popular map that I always show in my lectures whenever I give guest lectures on this topic. And I usually ask, you know, are people familiar with the ways that the land, in the ways that land is controlled and is occupied? How has that changed in the United States? How has this gone all the way up to where we're looking at in the present day, we'll go through this one more time. But as you see, the green represents Native lands, white represents settler-controlled land. And this is what it looks like today. And one more time, a very, very good map by Sam Hiller down at LSU.

So there's a variety of different explanations as to how land in histories have been obscured. And we'll go through a couple here, but first, I want to highlight a term called settler colonialism, which I'll use in my answers today and also refer to in this talk. So settler colonialism is distinct from more what we would call maybe more traditional extractive colonialism where the idea that a colonizing power comes in and extracts resources out of a territory to bring back to the colonized country. Settler colonialism works a little differently. It's a form of colonialism that is built upon the settlement and enduring occupation of land by a colonizing power at the expense of indigenous presence upon the land. So to put that into more lay terms, settlers would come from say, England from the United Kingdom, and they would come to North America and they would occupy land and they would come into friction and conflict with Indigenous peoples and they would gradually push them off of the lands in order to build up white Anglo European cities and villages and structures of inhabitants. The late scholar Patrick Wolf, who in settler colonial studies is one of the fore runners of the modern field, famously said that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. He said that because there is, while there is a beginning to colonization, there is no point in settler colonial logics where colonization is meant to end. There is no point where that settler colony says, okay, we've gotten what we need, we can pack up and go back to Europe. Settler colonialism is instead built in, is structurally constructed, in order to endure and to permanently occupy the space. It does so by eliminating in the pursuit of replacements, and it relies on the myth of terra nullius to proceed.

So the next question that probably pops up is well, what is terra nullius? That's right, it's a Latin term that stands for nobody's land. And I'll again put this into kind of more general terms. So terra nullius, is this logic where the land was believed to be empty. Europeans would come and say, well, look at all of this, look at all this open land for us to be able to settle into, farm into, make industrial use out of. Generally speaking, that wasn't exactly the case. They would find Indigenous peoples on that land. And that would be waved away by saying, well, if you take a look at these, quote, savage people, right, they don't farm like we do. They don't really make use of the land like we do. They're not making productive use of the land at all. And they're so bad at trying to make use of it productively per our standards that it might as well be empty and unused.

 Terra nullius is a is oftentimes a very colloquial term when we study this sort of thing. In the Australian context, it's actually a legal term. There's a series of court cases in the 1990s that talked about whether the British Crown, whether the British Crown could recognize terra nullius as a legal framework through which settlers occupied the continents that Australia. But in American and Canadian settler colonialism, which are the two forms of colonialism that I work with, there are similar concepts. Probably the most well-known ones, the idea of Manifest Destiny is represented here by the famous picture Manifest Destiny, as you see here, settlers moving from the right or from the east, across to the left of the West are bringing progress and light and driving away Indigenous peoples and their and wild animals and trying to tame them and trying to build a country, right? This is one of the most enduring images of the way that we've constructed American history is through the building of a country out of nothing, that there was nothing here and hardworking pioneers constructed a country and built up a continent. So of course, as we talked about this is accomplished through elimination and destruction.

So on one hand, you have the destruction of indigenous identity, right? The policy of assimilation. And again, I use it here and quote, "savage indigenous peoples" were to be brought into quote "modern European society." Of course, there was no guarantee of full political rights. But the idea was that, you know, maybe, it may not be humane to just brutally genocide them, so let's try to find ways to try to make them into better human beings. It's probably, for those of you that follow the news, especially indigenous news articles, residential schools, or boarding schools have been in the news quite recently. Boarding schools and residential schools were just one such technique, right? In these schools, they were, Indigenous children were discouraged from practicing their language, practicing their culture, their religion, and they were generally trained in manual labor. They were trained to fill in kind of the lower rungs of settler colonial economic society.

We talk about destruction of the land. So for those of you that may be calling in from the upper Midwest, you probably recognize that the picture on the first slide is a picture of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe. A well-known story from where I'm from in Minnesota. And the story was that, for those of you that don't know, the Cliff notes version is Paul is this legend of this giant Lumberjack and together with his blue ox, who he oftentimes tied a plow to, they basically reshaped the geographies of the Midwest in the northwest. They cut down trees. Their footsteps are so big that they filled up with water and became Minnesota's 10,000 Lakes. They rough housed and created the Grand Tetons and Yosemite. This is a form of kind of whitewashing the destruction of the land, right?

In actuality, there was widespread over hunting and destruction of animals and plants important to Indigenous peoples. The over hunting of bison on the Great Plains was one such example. Another example is as covered by scholars such as Nick Estes, the flooding of Indigenous territories in the name of flood control and irrigation. That picture here on the right is during the 1930s, when the Indigenous Chief pictured here on the left-hand side here is signing away his land to authorities in the Dakotas for a flood control project called the Pick-Sloan Act. And you can see he's not very happy about that, right? He's signing that knowing that he really doesn't have a choice and that his people will be monetarily compensated. But hundreds of 1000s of acres of their land would subsequently be underwater, as well as something that is, well, as other forms of destruction of the land and energy production initiatives such as pipelines have been very prominent in news media and public consciousness today, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline on Keystone XL, etc.

So what does this all have to do with teaching about indigenous peoples in history, right, in K through 12 education and even beyond. I talk about how, you know, people oftentimes don't know these histories. And then I teach about these things in college. And a lot of times my students say, I didn't know that this happened. Why did I not know this happened? This makes me angry that I didn't know and I say, well, it's not really your fault, right? It's how education about Indigenous peoples have proceeded. Or there's a lack of Indigenous histories and presences in social studies, education in K through 12, in college curriculum beyond elective coursework. And then if you're lucky enough at the college level, your school might have an Indigenous Studies Program, right? We have American Indian Studies at OSU. Up here at UVic, we have Indigenous Studies. Things are getting better. I was fortunate enough when I grew up in the Twin Cities that I went to a school that actually had a Native education program. But we still have a lot of work to go. And a lot of times this kind of comes out of kind of a broader view that, well Native Americans and indigenous people are part of the past and have either assimilated or disappeared completely. Then I say, well, what I taught earlier this summer in the workshop is well that's not the case, right? That there are, there oftentimes you are more than likely to have an Indigenous student in your classroom. And recognizing that we are a part of contemporary American society, and that we are still here is an important juncture point and beginning point to beginning to uncover the ways that Indigenous histories have been obscured in this country.

So in the interest of time, I will leave you with a question to think about, right? What was it? When was the first time you learned about Indigenous peoples, either in the United States or if you're not from the US in your home country, right? Was it in grade school or college? What did you first learn about them? And did you ever spend a lot of time on this topic. I can say in K through 12, we probably spent maybe a grand total of maybe like five or six classroom days on it and a lot of the things that I learned were in extracurricular things such as our Native education program. So I will leave it at that. Thank you. I don't know if this information is made available. But if you want to talk to me outside of this webinar today, there's my contact information, and I can make that available later on, too. Thank you all very much.

Thanks so much, Deondre. And last, but not least, let me introduce you to Dr. Robin Judd, who will talk today about race and Nazi Germany. Dr. Judd is associate professor of history at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Contested Rituals, Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and the Making of German Jewish Political Life. And she's completing her newest book, Love, Liberation and Loss: Jewish Military Marriages After the Holocaust. She currently directs the history department's Hoffman Leaders and Leadership in History Fellowship Program and is the Vice President for Programming of the Association for Jewish Studies, the leading Jewish Studies organization worldwide. at OSU, she teaches classes in Holocaust studies, Jewish history, and immigration history, and has received seven teaching awards. Over to you, Robin.

Dr. Robin Judd 

Wonderful, and I am just going to share my screen and go from there. I thank you so much, Nick, and the Origins team for inviting me and for organizing this session. So to jump in, and to take advantage of the five minutes or so that I have to speak. When I talk with my students about considering race and racism and Nazi policy, I often want them to come away from my courses with three important points.

And the first is the recognition of how tempting it is to back shadow and how very important it is for us as historians not to take the information that we have about what happens next and to place it on the past. But to really wrestle with the past and the past actors and what they knew and what was available to them. And that allows us to move to our next two points, right.

The second point is the constant interplay of ideology and action and behavior that today I'll be talking a bit more about, sort of the place of race and racism and Nazi thought. But it almost means nothing unless we also connect that with action, and also to be thinking about place in time that even in as short of a period of the study of Nazism from its formation of the German Workers Party in 1919, until the end of the war, and the sort of the post war years. Even though that's a pretty short period, even there, we see how place in time can really shape the ways in which people understood race and racism. So if we were to think about this teleology, if we were to think about this arc of different periods of time, what are some of the major points that I hope students understand? Well, first, I want them to understand the foundation. How before 1933, even before the Nazis are coming into power, and then consolidating power, there's first an understanding of racial purity, that there's a belief that there's something that can allow for a pure race, and something that can allow for an impure race. And that there are, there is a hierarchy of racism, races, and there's a superiority of one particular race. There's an uber mentioned race, and that is the Germanic race for the Aryan master race. There's a belief that not only is there a hierarchy of races, but at the very top of the race, the Aryan Germanic people, and the very bottom of the races, the Jews are locked in a struggle. And that struggle is almost going to be never-ending until the Jews are eliminated, that the Jews themselves are a racial category. They're not a national category. They're not a religious category. But to speak to what Deondre and Hasan and Alice set out, right, this is an imagined category, a sense that Jews live off of other races and weaken them, that they're parasitic, that they use their sexuality and sex for that to happen, that there's something in physically the act of reproduction that can sort of shift the genetic makeup and a person not using that language at this time, right to make these races and pure. That there're these deviant dangerous characteristics that are racial in nature. That they can't be removed. That there's, that even if a Jew converts, that this Jew will be forever deviant in some way. And that the family is absolutely central to race. That the nation is talked about in terms of a genealogical term, it's the volksgemeinschaft that the family is the source of reproduction, and that nonAryans have to be extirpated. They have to be taken from the national family tree, root and branch until if that's our foundation, then between '33 and '39 we see it built upon, right? In '33 to '39 we see the notion of living space, lebensraum, around being intricately connected to race. There's an explicit linkage of race with citizenship, that one can only be a citizen if one is of Germanic, or kindred blood, that there are certain groups that pose a racial threat to this revitalized state, and those include Jews and Roma Sinti, but they also include those who identified with hereditary and cognitively inherited diseases.

And as early as 1933, the Nazi state enforces sterilization and in 1939, it begins the so-called euthanasia program, or the T4 Program. And in this period of '33 to '39, there's a lot of attention on the United States. There's fascination with the so-called unruly racism of the US and there're questions as to how to separate the unruly racism of the United States with the very sort of organized racism of Nazi Germany. When we move to '39 to '41, we see that next layer being built upon right here, race and lebensraum, race and living space go hand in hand. There is the T4 program that gets introduced where we have the so-called euthanasia program. We have this focus on Slavs and the introduction of Slavs and Roma Sinti as slave laborers. We have the creation of ghettoisation for Jews in Poland, and we have the forcible movement of ethnic Germans. There's a supposed linkage between Jews and the war, between Jews and disease and that gets built upon one more time in 1941 to 1945 with the final solution. When we not only have an explicit link of Jews with the Soviet state, but we also have this racial threat that we imagine and all kinds of lands the Nazis claim for themselves, and an articulation of a need for the final solution, a need to eliminate racial threats through killing. So for my students, it's very important for them to understand the way in which the narrative gets built upon, and the ways in which Nazi Germany does not operate alone. That there's sort of a constant gaze to other racialized societies and how they are playing, how they play, that play out, and enact racial ideologies there. And with that, I'll end and hand the floor back over to you, Nick. Thank you.

Thank you so much to all four of you for these, these great opening remarks. I mean, it's so helpful to have a moment where we can sort of lay out some basic kind of aspects of the history that are important for us to think about and to walk away with. While you guys have all been talking, there have been an incredibly large number of questions that have come in. We will do our best to answer as many of them as we can. And I apologize in advance to the people who have asked if we don't get to your question. It's not because we didn't love it, just that there's really so many that have come in. But let's start here. Alice, I'm going to throw a question your way. Just to begin with, we've had several questions about really sort of the difference between perhaps modern racism and the premodern world. And in the sense that, you get the sense that racism in some ways began with the last few 100 years, or race or ideas of race began, our last few 100 years. What's different about kind of modern ideas of race and racism? What might we have seen in earlier societies? People have asked about the Greeks and Romans. People have asked about the kind of early Islamic civilizations. I'm hoping you could talk a little bit about what, yeah, what makes modern ideas of modern race modern?

Well, I could answer that in one word, which is science. In many ways, race and racism, though always linked, they're not the same thing. So you can have what we call racism, or we might call it ethnocentrism. I mean, that's existed historically forever, outsiders and insiders. So I very consciously use the word modern, because the modern way of sort of being in the world, modern rationality, we trace, typically back to the scientific revolution, or what's called the new science, if you don't like the word revolution. So in that sense, there is, it's very important to hold on to that concept when listening to me, because what I'm talking about is we live in a kind of post, but we live in the world that the scientific revolution created in every sense. And our modern lifestyle is linked to the development of modern science with its norms, its pursuit of a certain kind of truth, and the ways of ascertaining that truth. So when I say that the best science of the day accepted this concept of race, I'm talking about people who actually put their ideas through the scientific processes, we understand, that peer review, publish articles in scientific journals, debates. And it's through that process that they ultimately recognize their errors, too. So I want to, I hope that clarifies what is modern about the idea, our idea of race. I'm not sure it's the only genealogy for our modern idea of race, but it's an important one.

Do you think too, Alice, that there's something about the state and citizenship that informs modern kinds of modern notions of race, but also the implications of those notions?

Absolutely. I think that the next step, and the argument you might take, is whatever scientists thought they were doing in their laboratory got politicized, always gets politicized, more dangerously in some moments than others. We know that living through a moment in which science is being contested. So the whole development of the modern nation state made it really almost impossible that the race concept did not somehow get politicized, I would say weaponized even, as nations began to think of themselves as perhaps needing to correspond to a specific race. And of course, the Nazi state is the ultimate expression of that horrific kind of politicization and weaponization.

So, excuse me, Hasan, let me throw a question your way because there were a couple of questions that came out of your initial comments about the relationship between kind of race and racism on one hand, and capitalism on the other, or capitalism and class on the other. With a question in particular, is capitalism somehow implicit in American racism and kind of vice versa?

I would say that racism is implicit in American capitalism, and it has always been. Capitalism, racism gave us slavery. Capitalism and racism gave us Jim Crow. Capitalism and racism have given us mass incarceration. Now, we also, there's nothing inherently, I mean, that's just a critique of the economic system in which we live. And sometimes it's the way that capital operates, the way that sometimes you know, African Americans have been excluded from participating in particular capitalist endeavors from employment to homeownership. But also the way in which racism as an ideology is used to justify the flight of capital, the flight of jobs more recently, in the modern American context. A multinational corporation closes a factory in Cleveland, Ohio, and moves to Mexico or to China. And white workers who are now unemployed are blaming Mexican workers and Chinese workers, as opposed to the multinational corporation that has chosen to flee this country for tax breaks and for lower wages. I mean, that's racism and capitalism being played out on a global scale. So I would say yes, they're intimately connected, and have always been so, which means that if we want to seriously do away with racism, we have to reimagine how our economic system operates in American society. Thank you.

I'm curious, Robin and Alice, do you see similar kinds of connections between kind of race and capitalism in the European context?

Certainly, I mean, one of the things that we talk a lot about in my courses is how the Nazis manipulated and used the economy toward their benefit, which was, by definition, a racialized economy. The Aryanization of Jewish businesses allowed for the Nazi state to recover the forced labor of Roma Senti, of Slavs, of Jews, that allows for the Nazi war machine to succeed for as long as it does. And, indeed, that there's a way in which the economies of small towns where internment camps or prison camps were located would become revitalized because of the work that was required. So there's so many ways in which the economies become intertwined and economic revival becomes intertwined with racial ideologies.

And if I may just add, I mean, the parallel to what we've seen since the 1980s in rural white communities being revitalized following deindustrialization by the placement of a prison and the warehousing of mainly black and brown people there. And you see exactly I mean, the way in which that is sort of racism and capitalism intertwined.

Absolutely. I mean, and it, you know, one begins to sort of break down, okay, well, what's needed, right? What's needed to build the present. Now what do we need in terms of workers? What do we need in terms of the profiting of the products? You know, what do we need? Do we need wood? Do we need steel? You know, who's going to be bringing it in and out? You know, who's going to be serving the meals and all of these kinds of questions. And then when we break it down to the local level, I think it allows students to really see how often racism can be intertwined with our economy.

I would just add that obviously, the whole history of European Colonialism in Africa and Asia is premised and in a very similar way on how to get, and you mentioned this, Deondre, too because settler colonialism worked the same way in America, as it did in South Africa, or Algeria, in places where the Europeans settled. But if you go to other parts of Africa, where they practice extractive colonialism, the whole idea was to integrate these economies in such a way that you had a cheap, docile labor force in the global south, and you had the wealth skimmed off and headed back to what they called the metropoles, or Europe itself. And Europeans are, you know, have long, there's long been a criticism within Europe, obviously, of these racist colonial economics. But it's really actually only in the last 20 years, that the same kind of reckonings going on there that has a much earlier history in the US.

Marvelous, thank you. I have a question that I wanted to send to Deondre, which has to do with sort of how do we differentiate between ethnicity, nationality and race? And in particular, how do those categories, what do those categories mean in the case of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples?

And so that's a great question. And that's a very, very complex one, when it comes to Indigenous peoples, especially in the American in the Canadian context is because a lot of times, sometimes people will refer to Indigenous peoples as a race and you'll if you ask many Indigenous peoples, they'll oftentimes say, well, we're not a race, right? We're a nation. You know, I can speak for like my own people where, you know, the Ojibwe, we have a long, long history of using our tribal identity, as viewing it in political and kinship sort of frameworks, rather than racial or biological constructs. I mean, there's well known examples of black Americans becoming adopted into the tribe and becoming well-respected members of the tribal community. And so, a lot of times when I get asked that sort of question, I always say, well, in terms of Indigenous peoples, you know, we get placed into racial categories and ethnic categories for the ease of demographics and things like that. But I always say, try to think about nationhood and kind of like, kind of national sort of frameworks above everything, right? Because we are not only peoples, but we're also political entities that many times predate the United States or predate Canada. And so that's generally a good entry way to think through such a thing such as that.

There's a series of thank you, Deondre, sorry, I was just reading all the different questions and trying to get them all in some form or other. Robin, there's a series of questions for you. And I guess I'll take two of them in particular. One about which was asked so why was being a Jew not considered a religion? And then also, are there similarities between the ideas of the volksgemeinschaft and of citizenship in Nazi Germany with modern perceptions of who is deemed American in our society?

That's, they're both such good questions. So one of the reasons why then Nazis were hesitant to think about the Jews as a religion was because Germany, when the Nazis come to power and then seize and consolidate power, Germany is a highly integrated mixed society. Jews intermarried at a very high rate, converted to Christianity, at a very high rate, in which you, they're no longer considered Jews, by themselves or by the Jewish community. But they are considered Jews by the Nazis, right. And so part of the part of what happens is that the Nazis don't want to work with Judaism and Jewishness as a religious category, because then it would allow for conversion to be meaningful. And instead, the Nazis want to use this imaginary category of race as a way of thinking, this biological race as thinking of that there's something quite inherent to the Jews that can't be converted out. I think the question about the volksgemeinschaft is a wonderful one. And certainly, this sort of the thinking about this messy, weird category of the nation state as being part of a family unit, right, and nationalist family unit is resonant to all of us, because we've been hearing a lot about that, right, over the last several years. And certainly, I think there's rhetoric, exclusionary rhetoric, in the nation now that imagines the US as this family, but it's not, but it's a particular family. It's a family of certain like individuals that excludes all the others and I think that's been quite resonant today.

Fabulous, thank you. A question that I'll send to Hasan. Can you talk a little bit, you know, in less than 20 hours about the current debate regarding critical race theory? We've had several people asking about this particular debate, so I think we'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Well, if you didn't know what critical race theory, we'd have heard, if you never heard about critical race theory before the start of this year, then there's a good chance what you think it is, it ain't. Critical race theory is simply a legal construct that, in its most simplest terms, says you have to take seriously the role of race and racism in society in order to understand the American past. And in order to understand the American present, that's it, or everything else is just political mumbo jumbo. It's not about sort of white people, you know, creating white guilt and white shame and that and all this other. That's just silly. I think what we're in the midst of is a politically manufactured hysteria that unfortunately we cannot dismiss because it is now impacting what we can and should and could and cannot actually teach in our classrooms. And so we have to take it very seriously. But it is really just saying that the idea and what people are advocating, they're saying you've got to take race and racism seriously in the classroom. And that we need to teach historical facts. We need to focus on honesty, and we have to lean into difficult conversations, and that which makes us uncomfortable, which is one of the things that we're doing right now. And look at that, we're having this conversation. And guess what, no white children blew up in the process, right? I mean it's totally possible for us to do this, and learn something and take it away and take something away.

Nick may have blown up. You still there, Nick?

I'm still there. Sorry. You know, it's the problem of Zoom. I click mute, the unmute, and I don't unmute. But there you go. But now I'm here. I have a sort of larger question here. That what I'll throw to Deondre to start, but I think everybody will want to talk about, which is, are recent racism kind of unit directional issues, meaning, should we only study racial dynamics relative to a normative pattern, that of white Europeans maintaining power or do the speakers believe racial systems should be studied as dynamic systems in which power can shift among racial groups?

So I guess I can start with that. So that's a really, really good question. I would probably say that if that would presuppose a system where you could have, you can presuppose a possibility where Indigenous peoples and Black Americans and Latinx peoples and Asian Americans could have, be allowed to occupy positions in power, where there could be a radical shifting of that dynamic. And I think that in current political discourse that that in itself creates so much kind of pushback, right? The Indigenous circles, the idea of the Land Back Movement, the idea that Indigenous people should be allowed to have ongoing relationships with the land and that land should be returned to Indigenous peoples. I mean, just that in itself. I see about every two months on Twitter, I see somebody going on there saying, oh, well Land Back as ethno-nationalism, right? Well, Indigenous peoples, if they get control of the land are just going to kick white people off of it. And I say, well, that's, I don't think that's exactly what that is. But I think that because of that kind of fear, right? The fear that well, what happens if they get power and they do the same thing to us that day that we did to them? I think that you have to think about how do we construct those kinds of discourses? And how do we make it so that, you know, it's truly, you know, a, quote, multiracial society, multiethnic society? It doesn't carry that Boogeyman with it, where it's like, oh, well, if we lose power, right? Isn't that like the, I'll probably get this wrong, but like the replacement theory, right? Isn't that kind of based on the idea that, oh, you know, other nonwhite Americans are going to, are gaining demographic strength compared to white Americans? And, you know, what are they going to do when that happens? And so I think that deconstructing that would be the first step to even kind of, I think, even approaching the kind of conversation of like, kind of shifting power dynamics or racial dynamics. I mean, I think there's other kinds of, there's other ones that can be described. You know, in Indigenous circles, a lot of times we talk about sometimes a rampant anti Blackness, right, that runs within those circles in the ways that Black Natives are treated, you know. But a lot of it kind of comes after people kind of point to well, that comes from kind of these colonial dynamics rights, where colonial or settler, settler colonial powers, oftentimes positioned Indigenous peoples, as you know, you're racially superior to African Americans and Black slaves, and therefore, you know, you occupy a higher rung in society. And unfortunately, I think some of our, some people kind of carry that colonized mindset with them into the present day, in very destructive and very racist ways. So I'll leave it at that and turn it over to other folks and see if they want to take a stab at this.

I might jump in here and just say, I think for someone who tries to teach European and colonialism to you know what are mostly white students, I try to tell students, what we're really doing is probing sort of the blind spots in liberalism. Not, you know, trying to understand, because there is a lot, not that we only have to study European, white Europeans, and that responsibility, though I think that's very important because a lot of them haven't understood the responsibility, and the complicity that white liberalism historically has played in constructing and perpetuating racism. But I also like to complicate the story by saying, you know, there's always resistance to these sort of white Europeans' privilege, and that white allies have been important to the struggle too and understanding how different sort of power dynamics developed within particular historical situations is critical to trying to change things. So I don't, I'm just sort of getting people to be comfortable with acknowledging that things, that awful things happened in the past, but that they, that we can hope that they can be corrected, if they learn about why it happened. So, you know, to get people past the sort of guilt, you know, guilting of white, anybody who is white, and trying to make them understand that talking about race is actually the first step to some kind of understanding and accountability.

You know, if we have a second, I would just say this is kind of a version of the reverse racism question, right? Like is reverse racism real? I know it's not real because you have to have the power in addition to the prejudice, right? Like it, you can always have prejudice, but that you don't have the historical examples of people of color of African Americans being in significant of positions of power to exert the kind of racial discrimination against white people that white people want to claim. Those who say reverse racism exists in some significant way. It's quite interesting that systemic racism against black people doesn't exist, but apparently systemic racism against white people does exist. It's always the same thing like on a theoretical kind, on a theoretical level. Certainly, right, anybody can harbor a kind of prejudice. But when we actually deal with it on concrete terms and historical reality, and say, well, who has had the power to exercise the prejudice over people, then historically, we're talking about certainly in the American context, and even globally, people of European descent, people of American descent. So we got to deal with the facts, and not deal with the myths centered around sort of the theoretical possibilities, that kind of ain't real, right? I mean, we deal with America.

Or the fear, I mean, you know, to just tap onto what Hasan just said, I think quite brilliantly, right. So much of it is about being afraid. And I think for our students, there's kind of a moment where we encourage them to recognize that that's real, and that it's really important there in the classroom and here and able to have those conversations and we work with them to figure out how to get beyond the fear to being able to see this, these historical patterns. So they understand that there can't be reverse racism in the world in which we exist, because the power just isn't there.

Marvelous. I think this is maybe a good place for us to unfortunately call it a day. We've gone over the hour that we're supposed to have set aside for this. And my apologies, there were so many great questions that I had hoped we might get to. And thank you all for posing those questions and hopefully, to some degree they've been answered through the conversations today. Let me say a very big thank you to Doctors Conklin, Jeffrey, Smiles, and Judd, for sharing their expertise today and their passion for history. Please join me in giving them a kind of virtual round of applause for what they've done today. I'd also like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences, especially Clara Davison, Jake Lac and Maddie Kurma. And also the history department, the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, the Clio Society, Bexley Public Library, and the magazine Origins, Current Events in Historical Perspective for their sponsorship. And once again, thank you, our audience for your excellent questions and for your ongoing connection to Ohio State. Stay safe and healthy, and we'll see you next time. Thank you all so much.

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do. Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

About the Author

PAULA M. L. MOYA, is the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford University. She is the Burton J. and Deedee McMurtry University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and a 2019-20 Fellow at the Center for the Study of Behavioral Sciences.

Moya’s teaching and research focus on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literary studies, feminist theory, critical theory, narrative theory, American cultural studies, interdisciplinary approaches to race and ethnicity, and Chicanx and U.S. Latinx studies.

She is the author of  The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism  (Stanford UP 2016) and  Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles  (UC Press 2002) and has co-edited three collections of original essays,  Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century  (W.W. Norton, Inc. 2010),  Identity Politics Reconsidered  (Palgrave 2006) and  Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism  (UC Press 2000). 

Previously Moya served as the Director of the Program of Modern Thought and Literature, Vice Chair of the Department of English, Director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and also the Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. 

She is a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, the Outstanding Chicana/o Faculty Member award. She has been a Brown Faculty Fellow, a Clayman Institute Fellow, a CCSRE Faculty Research Fellow, and a Clayman Beyond Bias Fellow. 

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The world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history. The U.S. has never been without it. DAVID R. ROEDIGER

What is a Social Construction

A social construct is an idea or collection of ideas that have been created and accepted by the people in a society. These constructs serve as an attempt to organize or explain the world around us.

For example:  For example, “childhood” is a social construct. All human beings begin their lives being young. Still, the idea that the very young, defined by a specific period of time should be given to access to toys, playgrounds, and juice boxes, is a creation of our American society. Nature determined that all human beings would be young before maturing. However, nature did not specify how older people should treat young people during this stage of life. Our ideas about how to raise children are beliefs decided and shared by the social community.

Race is a human-invented, shorthand term used to describe and categorize people into various social groups based on characteristics like skin color, physical features, and genetic heredity. Race, while not a valid biological concept, is a real social construction that gives or denies benefits and privileges. American society developed the notion of race early in its formation to justify its new economic system of capitalism, which depended on the institution of forced labor, especially the enslavement of African peoples. To more accurately understand how race and its counterpart, racism , are woven into the very fabric of American society, we must explore the history of how race, white privilege, and anti-blackness came to be.

THE INVENTION OF RACE The concept of “race,” as we understand it today, evolved alongside the formation of the United States and was deeply connected with the evolution of two other terms, “white” and “slave.” The words “race,” “white,” and “slave” were all used by Europeans in the 1500s, and they brought these words with them to North America. However, the words did not have the meanings that they have today. Instead, the needs of the developing American society would transform those words’ meanings into new ideas.

The term “race,” used infrequently before the 1500s, was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection. The modern-day use of the term “race” (identifying groups of people by physical traits, appearance, or characteristics) is a human invention. During the 17th century, European Enlightenment philosophers’ based their ideas on the importance of secular reasoning, rationality, and scientific study, as opposed to faith-based religious understandings of the world. Philosophers and naturalists were categorizing the world anew and extending such thinking to the people of the world. These new beliefs, which evolved starting in the late 17th century and flourished through the late 18th century, argued that there were natural laws that governed the world and human beings. Over centuries, the false notion that “white” people were inherently smarter, more capable, and more human than nonwhite people became accepted worldwide. This categorization of people became a justification for European colonization and subsequent enslavement of people from Africa.

Slavery, as a concept has existed for centuries. Enslaved people, “slaves,” were forced to labor for another. We can point to the use of the term slave in the Hebrew Bible, ancient societies such as Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as during other eras of time. Within the Mediterranean and European regions, before the 16th century, enslavement was acceptable for persons considered heathens or outside of the Christian-based faiths. In this world, being a slave was not for life or hereditary - meaning the status of a slave did not automatically transfer from parent to child. In many cultures, slaves were still able to earn small wages, gather with others, marry, and potentially buy their freedom. Similarly, peoples of darker skin, such as people from the African continent, were not automatically enslaved or considered slaves.

"White" Identity

The racial identity of “white” has evolved throughout history. Initially, it referred only to Anglo-Saxon people. Historically, who belonged to the category of “white” would expand as people wanted to push back against the increasing numbers of people of color due to emancipation and immigration.

The word “white” held a different meaning, too, and transformed over time. Before the mid-1600s, there is no evidence that the English referred to themselves as being “white people” This concept did not occur until 1613 when the English society first encountered and contrasted themselves against the East Indians through their colonial pursuits. Even then, there was not a large body of people who considered themselves “white” as we know the term today. From about the 1550s to 1600, “white” was exclusively used to describe elite English women, because the whiteness of skin signaled that they were persons of a high social class who did not go outside to labor. However, the term white did not refer to elite English men because the idea that men did not leave their homes to work could signal that they were lazy, sick, or unproductive. Initially, the racial identity of “white” referred only to Anglo-Saxon people and has changed due to time and geography. As the concept of being white evolved, the number of people considered white would grow as people wanted to push back against the increasing numbers of people of color, due to emancipation and immigration. Activist Paul Kivel says, “Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.”

European colonists’ use of the word “white” to refer to people who looked like themselves, grew to become entangled with the word “race” and “slave” in the American colonies in the mid-1660s. These elites created “races” of “savage” Indians, “subhuman” Africans, and “white” men. The social inventions succeeded in uniting the white colonists, dispossessing and marginalizing native people, and permanently enslaving most African-descended people for generations. Tragically,  American culture, from the very beginning, developed around the ideas of race and racism.

The Historical Evolution of Race (and Racism) in Colonial and Early America

Fueled by the Enlightenment ideas of natural rights of man, spurred by the passion for religious freedom, in search of property, and escaping persecution, European colonists came to North America in search of a place to create a new society. The ideals of Enlightenment spread to the North American colonies and formed the basis of their democracy as well as the most brutal kind of servitude - chattel slavery.

In the world before 1500, the notion of hierarchy was a common principle. Every person belonged to a hierarchical structure in some way: children to parents, parishioners to churches, laborers to landowners, etc. As the ideas of the natural rights of man became more prevalent through the 18th century, the concept of equality becomes a standard stream of thought. By categorizing humans by “race,” a new hierarchy was invented based on what many considered science.

Race is the child of racism, not the father. TA-NEHISI COATES Author of "Between the World and Me"

Slavery in the Colonies

Below is the year when enslaved Africans were first documented in some of the American colonies:

1619 - Virginia 1625 - Massachusetts ​Early 1600s - New Jersey 1626 - New York 1638 - Connecticut 1639 - Pennsylvania 1642 - Maryland 1645 - New Hampshire 1670 - Carolinas 1751 - Georgia

Within the first decades of the 1600s, the first Africans were captured and brought to the American colonies as enslaved labor (most colonies had made enslavement legal). At this time in colonial America, enslaved Africans were just one source of labor. The English settlers used European indentured servants and enslaved indigenous people as other forms of coerced labor. These groups of enslaved and forced labor often worked side-by-side and co-mingled socially. The notion of enslavement changed throughout the 1600s. In this early period, enslavement was not an automatic condition, nor did it uniformly apply to all African and African-descended people. Very importantly, being enslaved was not necessarily a permanent lifetime status. The boundaries between groups were more fluid but began to shift over the next few decades to make strict distinctions, which eventually became law.

Indentured Servitude

Indenture was a means for mainly English and Irish people who could not afford passage to the British colonies to enter into a labor contract.  They would sell their labor for a term, generally 4-7 years. Upon the completion of their indenture, the person was to be given land to begin a life.

Indentured servitude was hard, and many laborers did not survive their contract term and subsequently did not receive their land. For planters, indentured servants were economically more optimal in the early colonial period.

By the late 1600s, significant shifts began to happen in the colonies. As the survival of European immigrants increased, there were more demands for land and the labor needed to procure wealth. Indentured servitude lost its attractiveness as it became economically less profitable to utilize servants of European descent. White settlers began to turn to slavery as the primary source of forced labor in many of the colonies. African people were seen as more desirable slaves because they brought advanced farming skills, carpentry, and bricklaying skills, as well as metal and leatherworking skills. Characterizations of Africans in the early period of colonial America were mostly positive, and the colonists saw their future as dependent on this source of labor.

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What is Chattel Slavery?

Chattel slavery was a form of slavery in the U.S. in which enslaved people are legally considered and socially treated not as human beings, but as the personal property, or commodities, of free people.

The trajectory of Virginia’s development of chattel slavery highlights how the system of chattel slavery and, along with it, anti-blackness (opposed to or hostile toward black people) , was codified in colonial America. Labor status was not permanent nor solely connected to race. A significant turning point came in 1662 when Virginia enacted a law of hereditary slavery, which meant the status of the mother determined the status of the child. This law deviated from English common law, which assigned the legal status of children based on their father’s legal status. Thus, children of enslaved women would automatically share the legal status of “slave.” This doctrine, partus sequitur ventrem  (see below), laid the foundation for the natural increase of the enslaved in the Americas and legitimized the exploitation of female slaves by white planters or other men. In 1667, the last of the religious conditions that placed limits on servitude was erased by another Virginia law. This new law deemed it legal to keep enslaved people in bondage even if they converted to Christianity. With this decree, the justification for black servitude changed from a religious status to a designation based on race. See more information about the timeline of “ Slavery in the Making of America .”

Partus Sequitur Ventrem

Before 1660, in English common law, the legal status of children followed the status of the father. In the colonies, this doctrine followed the colonists. Elizabeth Key, an enslaved, bi-racial woman sued for her freedom in Virginia on the basis that her father was white.  The court granted freedom to her and her child in 1656.

In response to this case, Virginia instituted partus sequitur ventrem making children's legal status follow the mother.

Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 was a short-lived but had a long-reaching effect of deepening the racial divide in the colonial Chesapeake region. Coalitions of poor white people, free and enslaved Africans, rebelled against the rising planter class because they wanted to acquire land reserved for Virginia’s indigenous people. Elite colonists determined that they needed to amass more native lands for their continued expansion, to pacify poor European colonists who sought economic advancement, and to keep a dedicated labor force to do the grueling agricultural work. By the mid-1700s, new laws and societal norms linked Africans to perpetual labor, and the American colonies made formal social distinctions among its people based on appearance, place of origin, and heredity.

The Africans physical distinctiveness marked their newly created subordinate position. To further separate the social and legal connections between lower-class whites and African laborers (enslaved or free), laws were put into place to control the interaction between the two groups. These laws created a hierarchy based on race.

Paradox of Liberty in America’s Consciousness Colonists’ belief in natural laws produced revolutionary political thought in the last part of the 18th century. New generations of Americans, many born in the colonies, seized upon ideas like that of John Locke’s “Social Contract” which argues that all people naturally had a right to life, liberty and property, and that any created government is legitimate only with the consent of those people being governed. Thomas Jefferson built upon these ideas in the Declaration of Independence by proclaiming that “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were inalienable, God-given rights to all men.  After the Revolution, the U.S. Constitution strongly encoded the protection of property within its words. It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty - the human right to freedom and the socially protected rights to property - became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question(s) of who could - and can - claim the unalienable rights has been a question for America through time.

Colonists’ belief in natural laws produced revolutionary political thought in the last part of the 18th century. New generations of Americans, many born in the colonies, seized upon ideas like that of John Locke’s “Social Contract.” It argues that all people naturally had a right to life, liberty, and property and that any created government is legitimate only with the consent of the people it governs. Thomas Jefferson built upon these ideas in the Declaration of Independence by proclaiming that “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” were inalienable, God-given rights to all men. After prevailing in the American Revolution, our founders created the U.S. Constitution, which contains strongly-worded property rights. It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty - the human right to freedom and the legally protected rights to property - became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question(s) of who could - and can - claim unalienable rights has been an American debate since our inception.

The scars and stains of racism are still deeply embedded in the American society. John Lewis Congressman and Civil Rights Pioneer

America would come to be defined by the language of freedom and the acceptance of slavery. Along with the revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality, slavery concerns began to surface as black colonists embraced the meaning of freedom, and the British abolished slavery within their lands. The fledgling United States sought to establish itself and had to wrestle with the tension borne from the paradox of liberty. It became necessary to develop new rationales and arguments to defend the institution of slavery. How does one justify holding a human as property? Major political leaders and thinkers of American history promoted theories of difference and degeneracy about nonwhite people that grew in the late-18th century. Physical differences were merged with status differences and coalesced to form a social hierarchy that placed “white” at the top and “black” at the bottom. By the beginning of the 19th century, “white” was an identity that designated a privileged, landholding, (usually male) status. Having “whiteness” meant having clear rights in the society while not being white signified your freedoms, rights, and property were unstable, if not, nonexistent. Ironically, Jefferson and Locke also both made arguments for the idea of inferior “races,” thereby supporting the development of the United States’ culture of racism. Their support of inferior races justified the dispossession of American Indians and the enslavement of Africans in the era of revolution. It was this racial ideology that formed the foundation for the continuation of American chattel slavery and the further entrenchment of anti-blackness.

Excerpts from Thomas Jefferson's "Notes of the State of Virginia"

"I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind."

"Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior...and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture." Read More

The successful American Revolution and the new Constitution resulted in fierce debates about the future of slavery and the meaning of freedom. However, the nation did not end slavery nor the uses of racial ideology to separate groups, choosing to maintain the existing hierarchy. The U.S. outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, but the institution of slavery and its connection to African descendants remained. Boosted by the Louisiana Purchase, cotton agriculture (made profitable by the invention of the cotton gin), and seized American Indian lands, a new internal slave trade reinvigorated slavery, justified by 19th-century pseudo-scientific racist ideas.

Stop and Think!

Watch "The Origin of Race in the USA," and reflect...

How was the evolution of race connected with the rise of commerce and capitalism?

How were racial categorizations merged into law?

How did the revolutionary ideas of equality and rights of man also harden ideas of race?

In the mid-19th century, science and the scientific community served to legitimize society’s racist views. Scientists argued that Africans and their descendants were inferior - either a degenerate type of being or a completely separate type of being altogether, suitable for perpetual service.  Like the European scholars before them, American intellectuals organized humans by category, seeking differences between racial populations. The work of Dr. Samuel Morton is infamous for his measurements of skulls across populations. He concluded that African people had smaller skulls and were therefore not as intelligent as others. Morton’s work was built on by scientists such as Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz. Both Nott and Agassiz concluded that Africans were a separate species. This information spread into popular thought and culture and served to dehumanize African-descended people further while fueling anti-black sentiment.

"Types of mankind or ethnological researches, based upon the ancient monuments, paintings, sculptures, and crania of races, and upon their natural, geographical, philological, and biblical history" (Nott, Gliddon, 1854) (J.C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon/Google Books). License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

By the 1850s, antislavery sentiment grew intense, in part, spurred by white Southerner’s aggressive attempts to protect slavery, maintain national political dominance and to spread the “peculiar institution” to newly acquired American lands. Proslavery spokespeople defended their position by debasing the value of humanity in the people they held as property. They supported much of this crusade through the racist scientific findings of people like Samuel Morton, which was used to argue the inferiority of people of African descent. As the tension between America’s notion of freedom and equality collided with the reality of millions of enslaved people, new layers to the meaning of race were created as the federal government sought to outline precisely what rights black people in the nation could have.

Dred Scott v Sanford

Taney wrote in the majority decision, "[black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can, therefore, claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them." — Dred Scott, 60 U.S. at 404–05.

It was in this philosophical atmosphere that the Supreme Court heard one of the landmark cases of U.S. history, the Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott and his wife claimed freedom on the basis that they had resided in a free state and were therefore now free persons. The Supreme Court ruled that Scott could not bring a suit in federal court because Black people were not citizens in the eyes of the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney also ruled that slaves were property based on the Constitution, and therefore owners could not be deprived of their property. Ultimately, Taney declared with the full force of law that to be black in America was to be an “inferior being” with “no rights” which the white man was bound to respect,” and that slavery was for his benefit. Taney used the racist logic of black inferiority that saturated American culture of the time to argue that African descents were of another “unfit” race, and therefore improved by the condition of slavery. The court’s racist decision and affirmation that African descendants were mere property would severely harm the cause of black equality and contribute to anti-black sentiment for generations to come.

Illus. in: Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, v. IV, no. 82 (1857 June 27), p. 49, photo: Fitzgibbon, John H., 1816?-1882. Top-left: Eliza and Lizzie, children of Dred Scott, Bottom-left: Dred Scott, his wife, Harriet. [New York: Frank Leslie] Photograph. Source: Library of Congress

More on Dred Scott

Read " The Human Factor of History: Dred Scott and Roger B. Taney ," on the NMAAHC blog.

The nation fiercely defended slavery under the guise of property rights because the forced labor of black people was extremely profitable to the entire country. America further developed its concept of race in the form of racist theories and beliefs - created to protect the slavery-built economy. These beliefs also resulted in the establishment of widespread anti-black sentiments, which would influence the American consciousness long after slavery ended.

In 1847, Frederick Douglass responded to prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, “ I have no love for America as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The Institutions of this country do not know me - do not recognize me as a man."

What do you think he meant? How did the “institutions of this country” see him?

There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution. Frederick Douglass

Segregation & Jim Crow

Segregation was a formal system of separating people in U.S. society based on race, achieved by discriminating against black Americans in particular, on all aspects of social life including, for example, limiting access to public accommodations, to housing, health care, education, and job opportunities.

Jim Crow Laws The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three-quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order. Source: PBS, The American Experience

Reconstructing Race in the Nadir When the Civil War ended slavery, the entire nation shifted its economic reliance to free labor. Still, the damage of anti-blackness and the hierarchy of race continued to shape how people related to one another and how the government would regard and legislate to various “races.” The U.S. came to depend on the exploitation of cheap labor, especially that of those considered nonwhite people, but also that of poor whites, including women and children. White society, particularly in the South, were reluctant to shift their views of black Americans and sought ways to continue exploiting the labor of African descended people while simultaneously remaining privileged. The debt-bonded labor system called sharecropping and hierarchical social order of segregation called Jim Crow would lay the foundation for a deepening racial divide.

Keeping the Concept of Race Alive

The abuse of Chinese immigrant labor in the West was another example of American exploitation defended by the nation’s beliefs of “racial difference” in the late 19th century. When white Americans started to fear economic competition from the immigrants, the nation's racist logic resulted in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In an era of waves of new immigration from Europe, the law specifically blocked the legal arrival of the Chinese.

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, many localities and states enacted laws and social norms that would re-establish the social order where whiteness was supreme. The U.S. legally affirmed the practices of segregation through the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case [see video below] . By law, Americans could lawfully separate people in society and discriminate against black Americans based on race. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision of “separate but equal” legitimized the idea of white supremacy in America as well as the de facto segregation already occurring in the nation outside the South. It resulted in the creation of a multitude of new racist laws and practices whose ramifications are still impacting the country today. American society drew upon centuries of racist ideas to justify this new form of exclusion and exploitation, especially that of scientific racism and Social Darwinism. Newly elaborated racist concepts reinforced the societal belief in supposedly inherent differences between black and white people – helping keep alive the concept of race and racial difference for all people in America.

African Americans and the Chicago World's Fair

African Americans were excluded from the planning of the world's fair and from substantial roles during the fair. Leading voices of the African America community - Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett among them - wrote a pamphlet excoriating the racist decisions made, which excluded blacks from sharing the world stage as American citizens.  Read More

Backed by the scientific racism of the mid-19th century, a branch of pseudoscience called eugenics contributed to further legitimizing societal belief in the biological superiority of those people considered white and the subjugation of other groups in descending order as skin tones darkened. Eugenics argued that people could be divided up into various races of people according to their genetic descent and were predisposed to be either superior or inferior by nature and in culture. As the 19th century drew to a close, one of the most elaborate displays of this new scientific belief was the Anthropology Exhibition at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. In this very public forum, people were displayed in various arrangements of progress and reinforcing to the general and visiting public the racial hierarchy of the time.

Racial Integrity Laws

Racial integrity laws were passed by the General Assembly to protect "whiteness" against what many Virginians perceived to be the negative effects of race-mixing. They included the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited interracial marriage and defined as white a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian"; the  Public Assemblages Act of 1926 , which required all public meeting spaces to be strictly segregated; and  a third act , passed in 1930, that defined as black a person who has even a trace of African American ancestry. Read More

Similar to earlier decades, the category of white expanded or contracted during the early 20th century to include various groups of people such as the Italians and the Eastern European immigrants that were coming to America. Other groups, such as the Chinese, Indigenous people, and black people, would remain outside the world of whiteness. As a result, they would struggle to gain the same privileges afforded to whites, such as voting, education, citizenship, and a share in the nation’s wealth. Acceptance into American culture was closely linked with the assimilation of whiteness, thereby creating an unconscious connection between who is American and whiteness .

How did 19th and 20 th -century scientific racism create and reinforce notions of racial hierarchy?

Take a moment to reflect

Let's Think

Listen: “How Did Famous Philosophers Promote Racism in America?” A new book by Joel Edward Goza examines the ideologies of Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke and how they perpetuated racist ideas and inequalities . Listen to this conversation with Goza and Houston Public Radio .

Read and Reflect:

• " Created Equal: How Benjamin Banneker Challenged Jefferson on Race and Freedom "  
• “ The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson ," A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder. By Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian magazine.
• After reading this article, what do you think were the primary reasons that “Enlightened” thinkers, like Jefferson, remained slaveholders and enablers of the slave system?

It can be tempting to believe that the way to encourage Americans to stop believing in the concept of race is to simply stop talking about race. But American society has had generations of ideas about race that still circulate, and legal and social policies that have profoundly shaped the lives of nonwhite and white people. However, ignoring these ideas and policies does not end their effects.

Find a willing partner and start a discussion. Imagine you lived in America during three different periods (1808, 1908, 2008), considering the race ideas circulating at these times, what opportunities do you believe might be open to you, what opportunities might not? Would not talking about race during each of these periods have changed your situation? Discuss it with your partner.

EDUCATORS: Access the Color Line Activity from Zinn Education Project to help teach your class about the shift in legal status which divided white indentured servants and conferred lifetime enslaved status on black people.

What do you think is the importance of Thomas Jefferson’s twin legacies of forwarding radical notions of democracy and social equality AND racism in America?

Join others committed to talking openly and honestly about the role race plays in shaping your lives and access to opportunities to heighten your awareness. Recognize the racial stereotypes and myths discussed above and challenge them when you encounter them in your own thinking, or during conversations in your communities.

Why Us, Why Now?

40+ Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism Worth Exploring

by  Antony W

April 21, 2023

The first step to write an essay on racism is to select the right topic to explore.

You then have to take a stance based on your research and use evidence to defend your position.

Even in a sensitive issue of racial discrimination, you have to consider the counterarguments highly likely to arise and address them accordingly. 

The goal of this list post is to give you some topic ideas that you can consider and explore.   We’ve put together 30+ topic ideas, so it should be easy to find an interesting issue to explore.

What is Racism?  

Racism is the conviction that we can credit capacities and qualities to individuals based on their race, color, ethnicity, or national origin. It can take the form of prejudice, hatred, and discrimination, and it can happen in any place and at any time.

Racism goes beyond the act of harassment and abuse. It stretches further to violence, intimidation, and exclusion from important group activities.

This act of judgment, prejudice, and discrimination easily reveal itself in the way we interact with people and our attitude towards them.

Some forms of racism , like looking at a person’s place of origin through a list of job applications, may not be obvious, but they play a part in preventing people or particular group from enjoying the dignity and equality of the benefits of life simply because they are different.

Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism  

• Is racism a type of mental illness in the modern society?
• Barrack Obama’s legacy hasn’t helped to improve the situation of racism in the United States of America
• The women’s movement of the 1960s did NOT unite black and white women
• Will racism eventually disappear on its own?
• Is there a cure for racism?
• There’s no sufficient evidence to prove that Mexicans are racists
• Is the difference in skin color the cause of racism in the western world?
• Racism isn’t in everyone’s heart
• Racism is a toxic global disease
• Will the human race ever overcome racial prejudice and discrimination?
• Can a racist be equally cruel?
• Should racism be a criminal offense punishable by death without the possibility of parole?
• Are racists more principled than those who are not?
• Can poor upbringing cause a person to become a racist?
• Is it a crime if you’re a racist?
• Can racism lead to another World War?
• The government can’t stop people from being racists
• Cultural diversity can cure racism
• All racists in the world have psychological problems and therefore need medical attention
• Can the government put effective measures in place to stop its citizens from promoting racism?
• Can a racist president rule a country better than a president who is not a racist?
• Should white and black people have equal rights?
• Can cultural diversity breed racism?
• Is racism a bigger threat to the human race?
• Racism is common among adults than it is among children
• Should white people enjoy more human rights than black people should?
• Is the disparity in the healthcare system a form of racial discrimination?
• Racial discrimination is a common thing in the United States of America
• Film industries should be regulated to help mitigate racism
• Disney movies should be banned for promoting racism
• Should schools teach students to stand against racism?
• Should parents punish their children for manifesting racist traits?
• Is racism the root of all evil?
• Can dialogue resolve the issue of racism?
• Is the seed of racism sown in our children during childhood?
• Do anti-racist movements help to unite people of different colors and race to fight racism?
• Do religious doctrines promote racism?
• There are no psychological health risks associated with racism
• Can movements such as Black Lives Matter stop racism in America?
• Do anti-racist movements help people to improve their self-esteem?
• Racism is against religious beliefs
• Can teaching children to treat each other equally help to promote an anti-racist world?

We understand that racism is such a controversial topic. However, it’s equally an interesting area to explore. If you wish to write an essay on racism but you have no idea where to start, you can pay for argumentative essay from Help for Assessment to do some custom writing for you.

If you hire Help for Assessment, our team will choose the most suitable topic based on your preference. In addition to conducting extensive research, we’ll choose a stance we can defend, and use strong evidence to demonstrate why your view on the subject is right. Get up to 15% discount here .

Is it Easy to Write an Argumentative Essay on Racism?

Racism is traumatic and a bad idea, and there must never be an excuse for it.

As controversial as the issue is, you can write an essay that explores this aspect and bring out a clear picture on why racism is such a bad idea altogether.

With that said, here’s a list of some argumentative essay topics on racism that you might want to consider for your next essay assignment.

How to Make Your Argumentative Essay on Racism Great 

The following are some useful writing tips that you can use to make your argumentative essay on racism stand out:

Examine the Historical Causes of Racism 

Try to dig deeper into the topic of racism by looking at historical causes of racial discrimination and prejudices.

Look at a number of credible sources to explore the connection between racism and salve trade, social developments, and politics.

Include these highlights in your essay to demonstrate that you researched widely on the topic before making your conclusion.

Demonstrate Critical Thinking 

Go the extra mile and talk about the things you believe people often leave out when writing argumentative essays on racism.

Consider why racial discrimination and prejudices are common in the society, their negative effects, and who benefits the most from racial policies.

Adding such information not only shows your instructor that you did your research but also understand the topic better.

Show the Relationship between Racism and Social Issues 

There’s no denying that racism has a strong connection with many types of social issues, including homophobia, slavery, and sexism.

Including these links, where necessary, and explaining them in details can make your essay more comprehensive and therefore worth reading.

related resources

• Argumentative Essay Topics on Medicine
• Argumentative Essay Topics About Animals
• Music Argumentative Essay Topics
• Social Media Argumentative Essay Topics
• Technology Argumentative Essay Topics

About the author 

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

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Article Contents

Critical philosophy of race: essays , by robert bernasconi.

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Kimberly Ann Harris, Critical philosophy of race: essays , by Robert Bernasconi, Mind , 2024;, fzae016, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzae016

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Robert Bernasconi’s Critical Philosophy of Race: Essays is a compilation of fifteen essays that offer a rare insight into what is now seen as a new subfield in the philosophy of race. It’ll be important not only for its novelty but for its courageous attempt to establish this new area of study, especially considering the active attempts to discredit it. But like all projects that claim to do something subversive, there is controversy about the subfield’s legitimacy and scepticism about its necessity. The appearance of this volume now will almost certainly provoke dispute again.

The primary contribution of this volume is that Bernasconi successfully sets critical philosophy of race apart from the philosophy of race. This volume is divided into four sections. Chapter One stands alone in the first section. There, he clarifies the program of critical philosophy of race.

Conspiracies had it that critical philosophers of race plagiarize their ideas from critical race theorists. They also insinuated that the idiom ‘critical philosophy of race’ is but a branding tactic critical philosophers of race use to get academic jobs. Mainly, these vague insinuations are mere hearsay. The point in mentioning them is that it is essential to recognize that the conspiracies stem from a suspicion about the distinctiveness of the subfield.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Racial Discrimination — Reflective On Race

Reflective on Race

• Categories: Racial Discrimination

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Words: 704 |

Published: Mar 19, 2024

Words: 704 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

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Introduction, exploring personal experiences, challenging assumptions, engaging with texts, developing original ideas.

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An Introduction to the Concept of ‘Race’ for Sociology Students

Race is now discredited historical concept which classifies people on the basis of biological differences.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on December 21, 2022 by Karl Thompson

‘Race’ is a historical concept used to categorise peoples based on biological differences such as skin colour and body type.

Today it is clear that there is no scientific basis for there being different races based on biological differences, but the historical ideas of ‘scientific racism’ have done much to shape social inequalities in the present, so we still need to deal with the now discredited term ‘race’ to understand inequalities today.

The concept of Race has been used by powerful groups as part of their strategies of domination, examples of which are the slave system in American history, and the holocaust against the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the contemporary situation of African Americans and Jews today cannot be understood without reference to racial segregation and racial ideologies – thus we still need to use and ‘deal with’ the term ‘race.

The historical concept of race

There have been numerous attempts by governments to establish categories of people based on skin colour or racial type. However these schemes have never been successful, with some identifying just four or five major categories and others as many as three dozen. Such disagreement over categorisations does not provide a reliable basis for social scientific research.

In many ancient civilisations, distinctions were often made between social groups on visible skin colour differences, usually between lighter and darker skin tones. However, before the modern period, it was more common for perceived distinctions to be based on tribal or kinship affiliations. These groups were numerous and the basis of their classification was relatively unconnected to modern ideas of race, with its biological or genetic connotations. Instead, classification rested on cultural similarity and group membership.

Scientific Racism

Theories of racial difference based on supposedly scientific methods were devised in Europe the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, and used to justify the emerging social order – in which European nations came to control overseas territories through colonialism.

Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816 -82), sometimes referred to as the ‘father of modern racism’ proposed the existence of just three races – white (Caucasian), black (Negroid) and Yellow (Mongoloid).

According to Gobineau, the white race possessed superior intelligence, morality and willpower, and these properties explained their technical, economic and political superiority, while the black race were the least capable race – possessing the lowest intelligence, an animal nature, and a lack of morality, which served to justify their position in the American society as slaves.

Such wild generalizations have today been discredited, but they have been extremely influential, forming part of Nazi ideology in 1930s and 40s Germany, as well as the ideology of racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the USA.

There is a link here to social action theory as the use of the concept of race illustrates W.I Thomas’ famous theorem that ‘when men define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences’. In other words, despite the fact that there is no objective basis for racial differences, because people in power have believed these differences to exist, they have perpetuated social orders which have systematically disadvantaged (in the case of European-colonial history) non-white people.

No such thing as Races

Many biologists report that there are no clear-cut races, just a range of physical variations in the human species. Differences in physical type arise from population inbreeding which varies according to the degree of contact between different groups. The genetic diversity within populations that share visible physical traits (such as skin colour) is just as great as the genetic diversity between populations.

As a result of such findings, the scientific community has virtually abandoned the concept of race. UNESCO recognized these findings in its 1 978 Declaration of Race and Racial Prejudice :

‘All human beings belong to a single species and are descended from a common stock. They are born equal in dignity and rights and all form an integral part of humanity’.

Some sociologists argue that race is nothing more than an ideological construct and should therefore be abandoned, because simply using the term perpetuates the very idea that there are significant racial differences between humans

Unfortunately, despite the biological facts of there being no signficant differences between the peoples of planet earth, the idea of ‘race’ still has meaning for many people and forms the basis for discrimination in many societies around the world today.

Students of sociology will come across the term ‘race’ in many text books, but often in inverted commas to reflect the problems with the concept discussed below.

Racialization

The process through which understandings of race are used to classify individuals or groups of people is called ‘racialization’. Historically, some groups of people came to be labelled as distinct on the basis of naturally occurring physical features. From the fifteenth century onwards, as Europeans came into contact with people from different regions of the world, attempts were made to explain perceived differences. Non-European populations were racialized in opposition to the European ‘white race’.

In some instances, this racialization developed into institutions backed up by legal structures, such as the slave system in the United States, or the Apartheid system in South Africa.

More commonly, however, social institutions have become racialized in a de facto manner – in other words, informal white prejudice and discrimination have resulted in a situation in which institutions have come to be dominated by white people, with non-white people being under-represented.

In racialized systems, the life chances of individuals are shaped by their position in that system – in European societies, for example, you would expect white people to have greater life chances in relation to education and work (for example), while non-white people would suffer reduced life chances .

It follows that racialization (and the ideas of ‘race’ that inform the process) is an importance factor in the reproduction of power and inequality in a society.

The concept of racialization might be a powerful tool for challenging racist ideology: because it essentially names the process for what it is – a purely subjective process used by the powerful to maintain positions of privilege, rather than the social divisions being created being based on any really existing significant objective differences  between individuals.

Signposting and Related Posts

I use this material as part of an introduction to sociology . You might also like this related post:

What is Racism?

Sources used to write this post include:

Giddens and Sutton (2017) Sociology

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2 thoughts on “An Introduction to the Concept of ‘Race’ for Sociology Students”

Hey thanks I-lll be sure to correct!

Fourth paragraph, typo: “face” should be “race” third sentence. “These groups were numerous and the basis of their classification was relatively unconnected to modern ideas of *face*, with its biological or genetic connotations.

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History Grade 11 - Topic 3 Essay Questions

Essay Question

To what extent did Australian government policies and legislation succeed in perpetuating racism and the dehumanization of the Aborigines in the 19th and 20th centuries? Present an argument in support of your answer using relevant historical evidence. [1]

Introduction :

A number of scholars agree that race was part of the Enlightenment project that resulted from the desire to classify people into distinct categories. [2] Racial classification certainly existed before this period, but the ‘modern’ application of race has much to do with Europe’s interaction with the ‘rest of the world’. [3] Thus, central to the project of European colonialism was the crystallization of Eugenics policies and an array of social Darwinist theories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These theories which later transformed government policy and law rendered non-European peoples as subhuman and biologically inferior and thus should be dispossessed of their land and other vital resources and ultimately exterminated in society. Therefore, and relevant to this essay, we will focus on the implementation of Eugenics policies and Social Darwinism in Australia in order to evaluate the extent to which these policies impacted on the Aboriginal people of Australia.

British colonisation and occupation of Australia

After the British colonised Australia in the 18th century, the first one hundred and forty years of Australian colonial history was marked by conflict and dispossession. [4] The arrival of Lieutenant James Cook and then Arthur Philip in 1788 marked the beginning of ‘white settlement’. [5] From 1788, Australia was treated by the British as a colony of settlement, not of conquest. Aboriginal land was expropriated by the British colonists on the premise that the land was empty (the terra nullius theory) and that the British colonists discovered it. This myth was applied across the colonial world to perpetuate and justify indigenous dispossession and genocide. [6]

Colonists viewed the indigenous Australians as inferior and scarcely human. Their way of life was seen as ‘primitive and uncivilised’, and colonialists believed that their culture would eventually die out. [7] This view justified colonial conquest of the Aboriginal people. Social anthropologists from universities who ‘studied’ the way of life of the Aborigines reinforced this view. [8] Firstly, this view added some ‘scientific’ credibility to observations about this ‘primitive’ society with the lowest level of kinship and the most ‘primitive’ form of religion. Secondly, it also added to the views of Australian eugenicists without deeply analysing the complexities of Aboriginal life. [9]

Application of eugenics policies on the Aborigines

Eugenics associations were established in many states, e.g., New South Wales and Victoria. In 1960 the Racial Hygiene Association, based in Sydney, became the Family Planning Association. [10] A prominent eugenicist in Melbourne was Prof Richard Berry who believed the Aborigines to be the most primitive form of humans. Berry studied and measured people’s heads to prove his theory that white, educated people were the smartest, while the poor, criminals and Aboriginal Australian were the least so. Berry proposed a euthanasia chamber for so-called mental defectives. [11] Ideas of racial decay and racial suicide were aimed at strengthening the number of whites in society, especially in the north where Asian populations were expanding. [12] In 1901 the Immigration Restriction Act was passed (known as the White Australia Policy). White racial unity was promoted as a form of racial purity.

Immigration was encouraged from the UK in 1922 to swell European numbers and thousands of children were sent to keep Australia white. 1912: white mothers offered £5 childbirth bounty in order to grow the size of wealthy middle -class families, which tended to have fewer children than poorer, pauper families in society. [13] This was partly in response to the debate around ‘racial suicide’. It was thought that the middle class would die out because they were not having enough children. [14] Decrease in the number of middle-class whites led to notions of ‘racial decay’. It was assumed that ‘racial poisons’ (e.g., TB, venereal disease, prostitution, alcoholism and criminality) would decimate whites with good stock (middle class). Plans were made to deal with ‘racially contaminated’ and misfits to keep middle class ‘pure’. [15]

Australia Immigration Policies

The White Australian policy of 1901 aimed at cohesion among the white population in the country. [16] It enshrined discrimination and white superiority. Between 1920 and 1967 thousands of British children between the ages of 3 and 14 were sent to Australia and Canada to boost the size of the white population. These children came from poor backgrounds and were mostly in social care. Many of these children were cut off from their families and were often told they were orphans. [17] In addition, a number of these children stayed in orphanages in Australia or became unpaid cheap labour on farms and in some instances were physically and sexually abused. The children who were forcibly migrated under the system became known as the Lost Generation. Catholic Church established homes to accommodate and assist migrant children. In 1987 the Child Migrant Trust under the leadership of Margaret Humphreys began to publicise the abuse of child migrants. [18]

The lost generation?

Children of mixed race were either viewed as inferior by some or as slightly more superior than other Aborigines. [19] However, at the beginning of the 20th century, these ‘half-caste’ children were viewed as a threat to the future of the white race in Australia. In 1913, W. Baldwin Spencer set up 13 proposals to manage the half-caste populations in and around the towns, mining housing and other sites of contact between ‘races’. These included: segregated living areas in certain towns, limits set on the employment of indigenous population by white Australians, the removal of Aboriginal people to a compound, the construction of a half-caste home in one area, a ban on interracial contact and authority given to protectors in some areas to remove ‘half-caste’ children from their families and place them in homes.

By 1930s the number of part-Aboriginal population increased. Dr Cecil Cook and A.O. Neville believed that the white race was headed for extinction. They were responsible for assimilation programmes for ‘breeding blackness out.’ About 100 000 ‘mixed-race’ children were taken from their parents between 1910 and 1970 to breed out Aboriginal blood. Cook encouraged lighter-skinned women to marry white men and in this way ‘breed out their colour’. In 1951, the new Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, claimed that assimilation would be the new policy to deal with the indigenous people and motivated this on the grounds of looking after the child’s welfare. Policemen or government officials often took children from their sobbing mothers, they were raised as orphans. Many of these children experienced abuse and neglect. Labels were used, e.g., quadroon, octaroon, to indicate how much ‘white’ blood they had. This policy only ended in 1971. These children are known today as the Stolen Generation. [20]

Reparations?

The practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families was not spoken about until 1997. An official enquiry revealed consistent abuse, exploitation in the labour market, social dislocation that led to alcoholism, violence, and early death. [21] In 2009 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament for the laws and policies that inflicted grief, suffering and loss on them. He particularly mentioned the ‘Stolen Generation’ who had been removed from their families. In 2010 Rudd apologised to the ‘Lost Generation’ of children who were held in orphanages and other institutions between 1930 and 1970. [22]

Racial ideologies were not simply advanced by a conglomeration of nationalism, imperialism, Darwinism and Eugenics. In the early Twentieth Century, there became evidence strands of simply cultural racism that can be seen as running alongside the biological determinism that was largely prevalent. From this perspective, individuals were suspicious or negative towards to other races not solely on the basis on racial differences, but because those differences represented a divergence in cultural values. This can be seen in the number of miscegenation laws that prevailed in Australia and elsewhere in the colonial world in this context, which have been interpreted as founded on notions of biological mixing. This therefore was an attempt to assert the supremacy of the white race over all other races. Therefore, the development of the sciences of evolutionary Darwinism and Eugenics provided further scientific validity to these views, justifying unequal power relationships either by pinpointing the inability of certain races to develop, or by suggesting the more advanced races had a personal benevolence to the others.

Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Hitlers consolidation of power from 1933 to 1934 :

The Great Depression had severe economic effects which increased support for political parties that were extremists such as the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which is popularly known as the Nazi party in English) on the right and the Communist Party on the left. [23] In 1993, Hitler was appointed as Chancellor by the then President Von Hindenburg. [24] This was a significant appointment as Hitler used his position as head of government to consolidate Nazi control. In power, the Nazis dominated the police force by utilizing them to break up meetings that opposition parties had and outlawed all forms of public meetings by justifying that these posed a ‘threat’ to public safety. on the 27th of February 1993, an arson attack occurred which burned the building which housed the German parliament, and this attack became known as the Reichstag Fire. After the Reichstag fire, Hitler got Von Hindenburg to pass a decree which suspended all articles in the constitution that guaranteed peoples key freedoms and liberty. [25] This meant that political opposition were arrested and subsequently sent to concentration camps. The Nazis did not win a clear majority in the elections despite rigorous intimidation and propaganda. As a result, Hitler banned the Communists from the Reichstag party which was supported by the Centre Party- a lay Catholic Party in Germany. [26] Hitler then arranged to get the Reichstag to agree to pass the Enabling Act which allowed him to make laws by decree. This made it possible for Hitler to centralise the government by taking away powers of the state governments. In addition, Hitler destroyed the free trade union movements and banned the Social Democrats and the Communist Party. [27] However, in 1934, an increasing number of left-wing elements within the Nazi Party were opposing Hitlers authority. [28] The Sturmabteilung- Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, which was led by Ernst Rohm was interested in the socialistic elements of Nazism. [29] In short, they wanted Germany to be a full socialistic state. However, the German Wehrmacht- unified armed forces of Nazi Germany opposed the Sturmabteilung’s stance. On the 30th of June 1934, Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS)- a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler got rid of the Sturmabteilung in which 400 of their murders were murdered including Rohm their leader. [30] The SS was now the new elite force which aligned itself with the Hitlers Nazi Party. Following the death of Von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler merged the positions of president and chancellor and became known as the Führer- leader. Within this new leadership structure, total loyalty was demanded from all Germans. This also led to Germany becoming police state- a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities. The SS were led by Heinrich Himmler who was a ruthless and brutal leader who ran the labour and concentration camps, including the Gestapo- secrete state police. [31] Most Germans understood that to resist the rule of the Nazis would be futile.

The creation of a racial state in Germany: defining the German nation in relation to the ‘other’:

In Germany, the ‘perfect German race’ came to be known as the Aryan race which was perceived as the master race by the Nazi Party. [32] The ‘other’ was other races which were perceived to be unproductive, asocial and undesirables such as the gypsies and the Jews which were viewed as coming from impure blood. These groups of people were thought to be inferior and therefore marginalised, treated as sub-human by segregating them and thus dehumanising them. [33] The Aryan race were considered superior because of their ancestry, survival instinct, ‘pure blood’, intellect and perception that they had the capacity to work hard. In Hitlers Nazi state, antisemitism was blamed on race. Hitler hated Jewish people and thus, this hatred shaped his political philosophy. As a result, Jews became a scapegoat for Germanies problems and were thus hunted down in order to eradicate them. To identify ‘others’, stereotyping was used to judge and isolate them. [34] This led to prejudice and gross discrimination which sometimes even meant death. The Nazi Parties promotion of the idea to cleanse Germany of all its ‘enemies’ and because Hitler hated Jews, this led to the mass killing of Millions of Jews.

Applying racial and eugenic laws and policies- Purifying the nation:

Positive eugenics- Refers to efforts which are directed and expanding desirable traits. Positive eugenic Nazi programmes thus encouraged the breeding of pure Aryans since they were viewed as the master race. [35] In these programmes, women were central in creating this perceived pure nation. What this meant practically was that breeding between ‘Aryan’ women and genetically suitable ‘Aryan’ men such as those who were part of the SS were heavily encouraged. In 1936, the Lebensborn programme was established in which SS couples who were deemed to be biologically, racially and hereditarily valuable families were selected to adopt suitable Aryan children. [36]

Negative eugenics- refers to effort which are directed to eliminate through sterilisation, segregation or other means those who are perceived or deemed to be physically, mentally or morally ‘undesirable’.  Negative eugenics programmes and laws were passed to eliminate ‘contaminating’ elements of German society. These took many different forms such as sterilisation programmes. [37] In July 1933, the Sterilisation law was passed which gave Nazis the power to sterilise any person who suffered from diseases or hereditary conditions such as schizophrenia or feeblemindedness. Approximately 350 000 people were sterilised as a result of this programme including teenagers of mixed race. In 1933, the Department of Gene and Race Care was establish and Genetic health courts helped enforce these laws. Concentration camps were established and by 1936, these camps were filled with prostitutes, alcoholics, beggars, homosexuals and juvenile delinquents. [38] By 1938, around 11 000 were sent to these camps. Euthanasia (intentionally ending life to relieve pain and suffering) programmes were established. At the beginning of WWII, Hitler signed a decree which allowed for the systematic killing (euthanasia) in institutions of handicapped patients who were considered incurable. [39] The name of the programme was called Operation T4. These killings were secretly carried out in order to prevent a negative reaction from the Catholic Church. These killings were ordered by doctors in special committees who decided who was going to be killed. Initially, these killings were done by lethal injection, however, carbon monoxide was later used. [40] Nazi records show that 70 273 deaths were carried out by gassing at six different euthanasia centres. These euthanasia programmes were just the testing for Jewish extermination later on.

Groups targeted by the Nazis:

Under Hitler, policies in Germany were based on anti-Semitism as he regarded Jews as a separate race who were un-Godly and evil. At first, discrimination made life very uncomfortable for Jews in Germany. However, as the Nazi Party grew in power by having less and less opposition in Germany, Hitlers Party introduced stricter laws against Jews. [41] Most German people chose to be bystanders when these atrocities were being committed. As a result of these laws, Jewish people were Segregated from political, economic, social and educational life in Germany.     Between the years 1933 to 1934, Jewish professions and buisinesses were being targeted which resulted in them being excluded from civil services. In 1935, the Nuremburg Laws (antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Germany by the Nazi Party) were passed. [42] The Nuremburg Laws meant that Jewish people were not considered German citizens and they forbade marriages between German citizens and Jewish Germans. However, these anti-Semitic laws were relaxed in 1936 because Germany hosted the Olympic games, and thus had many visitors. [43] The following year in 1937 ‘Aryanisation’ began again. When the Nazi Party annexed (The concept in international law in which one state forcibly acquires another states territory) Austria in 1938, anti-Semitism spread there as well. On November 1938, a German diplomat was murdered in Paris, and as retaliation, Jewish shops, buisineses, homes and places of worship were targeted throughout Germany. 20 000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, majority of whom were killed. [44] This event came to be known as Kristallnacht (Violent, state-mandated actions against Jews). This led to Jewish pupils being expelled from schools, Jewish businessmen forced to close their shops, Jewish valuables to be confiscated and in 1939 a curfew was introduced for Jews.

Sinti and Roma:

Gypsies in Germany, like the Jews were targeted for extermination. At first, many were deported as the ‘undesirables.’ However, later there were sterilisation laws against the gypsies.  A new law termed “Fight against the Gypsy Menace” required that all gypsies register with the police. [45] They were then forced into concentration camps and ghettos. In Europe, thousands of gypsy women and children were killed in various campaigns. A separate ‘Gypsy family camp’ was set up at Auschwitz-Birkenau which saw many inmates die of exhaustion from hard labour, disease, malnutrition and gassing of children which were done by a Dr called Mengele. [46] Alex Bandy, a Hungarian journalist termed this campaign the ‘forgotten holocaust’.

Other groups targeted by the Nazis:

Political opponents such as Social Democrats, Communists and Trade union leaders were targeted by the Nazis. [47] In addition, Religious opponents such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Dissident priests (Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany) were also targeted by the Nazis. Those accused of ‘asocial’ crimes such as criminals or homosexuals were also targeted by the Nazi Party. [48]

Choices that people made:

Perpetrators:

Some of the perpetrators of the Nazi regime were secretaries, train drivers, bureaucrats while others actively took part in the killings. [49] Others perpetrators were in the Einsatzgruppen (Extermination squads) while others ran the concentration camps. However, many Nazi Party official denied complicity and said that they were merely following orders. Some perpetrators even claimed that they were negatively affected by their violent actions. [50]

 Bystanders:

The vast majority of people not just in Germany but were the world were bystanders. By choosing this stance of being a bystander and be different and passive witnesses, bystanders affirmed the perpetrators. Within the group of bystanders, others chose to become the perpetrators, while others chose to be resisters or rescuers. [51]

Rescuers under the Nazi regime chose to courageously speak out against the regime or actively rescue victims. Many of these rescuers attributed their actions to their convictions and morality to resist evil. Many of them acted courageously based on their faith. Many hid Jews or smuggled them out of occupied areas. [52]

Responses of the persecuted: exile, accommodation, defiance:

Responses from being persecuted by the Nazi Party took many forms such as partisan activities such as smuggling of secret messages, exchanging of food and weapons which sabotaged the Nazis attempt to persecute those they deemed undesirable. In addition, those persecuted responded by military engagement with the Nazi Party despite being heavily suppressed by Nazi troops. Victims continued with their way of life such as cultural traditions, religious practices, creating music and art such as poetry inside the concentration camps and ghettos. In addition, some of the victims managed to escape or go into exile. This caused underground resistance movements aimed at countering Nazi propaganda with anti-Nazi propaganda. The determination for survival was also a form of resistance by victims.

From persecution to mass murder: The Final solution:

The Holocaust (Was the genocide of European Jews during WWII) was carried out as the ‘Final Solution’ under the guise of war. The Einsatzgruppen followed German soldiers into invading other territories. They arrested everyone who resisted and killed those they thought could resist. The Nazis carried out forced removals of those they deemed sub-human or undesirables and carried out mass murders. [53] In Poland, thousand of Polish citizens were sent to labour and concentration camps. Jews were forcibly put in overcrowded ghettos were many would die of inhumane conditions and starvation.

Labour and extermination camps:

In 1941, the Einsatzgruppen followed invading troops into Russia where thousands of Jews were rounded up in preparation to send them to concentration camps. 700 Jews were gassed in vans in Chelmo. This reinforced Hitler’s desire for a ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question. The death camps under the SS were established for this reason. [54] In addition, extermination centre sites were purposely located near railway lines so that there was efficient transportation. In 1942, there were mass deportations of Jews from the ghettos. A lot of them died along the way due to the unhygienic conditions, lack of food and heat in transportation. Gas chambers were created for the purposes of mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B pellets. Jewish bodies were cremated, and their ashes and bones were intended for fertilisers. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. [55]

Forms of justice: The Nuremburg Trials:

Allied forces decided that the main perpetrators of the Holocaust should be put on trial. [56] An international military tribunal was set up at Nuremburg where 22 Nazi leaders were put on trial for crimes against humanity in addition to their other war crimes. [57] Nazi records provided a much of the evidence and details of the crimes the leaders and committed. The accused did not deny having committed these crimes but were claiming that these crimes were not against humanity. Others argued that they were simply following orders. 13 different trials were set up in Nuremburg between the years 1945 and 1950 and 12 defendants were sentenced to dead. In total 199 Nazis were put on trial. This type of justice is called punitive justice where the perpetrators get punished for their crimes. [58]

Shortcomings of the process:

These trials did not come without their shortcomings, some of which included small perpertrators not being called and held accountable for their actions as they could deny their complicity for what had happened. In addition, victorious allies carried out the trials and as a result, Germany and German people never faced what they had done. For many years there was a culture of silence and this could be regarded as a denial of responsibility. [59]

Positive outcomes of these trials:

These trials did come with some positives such as giving people new ways of thinking about how to tackle gross human rights violations. Restorative justice and mechanism such as truth and reconciliation commissions could be formed in the future. Examples of such truth and reconciliation commissions around the world are the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. [60]

This content was originally produced for the SAHO classroom by Ayabulela Ntwakumba and Thandile Xesi

[1] National Senior Certificate. “Grade 11 November History Paper 1 Exam,” National Senior Certificate, November 2018.

[2] Cohen, William B. "Literature and Race: Nineteenth Century French Fiction, Blacks and Africa 1800-1880." Race 16, no. 2 (1974): 181-205.

[3] Macdonald, Ian. "The Capitalist Way to Curb Discrimination." Race Today (1973): 241.

[4] http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/History_3_Colo…

[7] https://australianstogether.org.au/discover/indigenous culture/kinship.

[8] Moses, A. Dirk. "An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89-106.

[9] Genger, Peter. "The British Colonization of Australia: An Exposé of the Models, Impacts and Pertinent Questions." Peace and Conflict Studies 25, no. 1 (2018): 4.

[10] Barta, Tony. "Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia." Genocide and the modern age: etiology and case studies of mass death 2 (1987): 237-253.

[11] Foley, Gary. "Eugenics, Melbourne University and me." Tracker: be informed, be involved, be inspired (2012).

[12] Ibid.,

[13] Banner, Stuart. "Why Terra Nullius-Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia." Law & Hist. Rev. 23 (2005): 95.

[14] Ibid.,

[15] Lester, Alan, and Nikita Vanderbyl. "The Restructuring of the British Empire and the Colonization of Australia, 1832–8." In History Workshop Journal, vol. 90, pp. 165-188. Oxford Academic, 2021.

[16] Hunter, Ernest, and Desley Harvey. "Indigenous suicide in australia, new zealand, canada and the united states." Emergency Medicine 14, no. 1 (2002): 14-23.

[17] Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A view of the art of colonization, with present reference to the British Empire. JW Parker, 1849.

[18] Hollinsworth, David. Race and racism in Australia. Thomson Learning Australia, 2006.

[19] Ibid.,

[20] Hume, Lynne. "The dreaming in contemporary aboriginal Australia." Indigenous religions: a companion. London: Cassell (2000): 125-138.

[21] Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, place and Aboriginal ownership. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[22] Ibid.,

[23] King, Gary, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander F. Wagner. "Ordinary economic voting behavior in the extraordinary election of Adolf Hitler." The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 951-996.

[24] Caldwell, Peter. "National Socialism and Constitutional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter, and the Debate over the Nature of the Nazi State, 1993-1937." Cardozo L. Rev. 16 (1994): 399

[25] Bessel, Richard. "The Nazi capture of power." journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 169-188.

[26] Evans, Richard. "Hitler's Dictatorship." History Review 51 (2005): 20.

[27] Ibid.,

[28] Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "SA." Encyclopedia Britannica, November 11, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/SA-Nazi-organization .

[29] Ibid.,

[30] Ibid.,

[31] Power, Jonathan. "Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Deputy–From Boyhood to Chief Murderer of the Jews." In Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals, pp. 13-18. Brill Nijhoff, 2017.

[32] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryan-1

[33] Ibid.,

[34] Ibid.,

[35] Grodin, Michael A., Erin L. Miller, and Johnathan I. Kelly. "The Nazi physicians as leaders in eugenics and “euthanasia”: Lessons for today." American journal of public health 108, no. 1 (2018): 53-57.

[36] Ibid.,

[37] Kevles, Daniel J. "Eugenics and human rights." Bmj 319, no. 7207 (1999): 435-438.

[38] Ibid.,

[39] Benedict, Susan, and Jochen Kuhla. "Nurses’ participation in the euthanasia programs of Nazi Germany." Western Journal of Nursing Research 21, no. 2 (1999): 246-263.

[40] ibid.,

[41] Johnson, Mary, and Carol Rittner. "Circles of Hell: Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazis." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548, no. 1 (1996): 123-137.

[42] Kroslak, Daniel. "Nuremberg Laws." The Lawyer Quarterly.-ISSN 8396 (1805): 184-194.

[43] Rippon, Anton. Hitler's Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games. Pen and Sword, 2006.

[44] Fitzgerald, Stephanie. Kristallnacht. Capstone, 2017.

[45] Lutz, Brenda Davis. "Gypsies as Victims of the Holocaust." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3 (1995): 346-359.

[46] Ibid.,

[47] Evans, Richard. "Hitler's Dictatorship." History Review 51 (2005): 20.

[48] Ibid.,

[49] O’Byrne, Darren. "Perpetrators? Political civil servants in the Third Reich." In Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence, pp. 83-98. Routledge, 2018.

[50] Ibid.,

[51] Monroe, Kristen Renwick. "Cracking the code of genocide: The moral psychology of rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust." Political Psychology 29, no. 5 (2008): 699-736.

[52] Ibid.,

[53] Breitman, Richard. "Plans for the final solution in early 1941." German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 483-493.

[54] Pohl, Dieter. "The Holocaust and the concentration camps." In Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, pp. 161-178. Routledge, 2009.

[55] Ibid.,

[56] Steinacher, Gerald J. "The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence Kim Christian Priemel." (2018): 123-124.

[57] https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials

[58] Ibid.,

[59] Ibid.,

[60] Adam, Heribert, and Kanya Adam. "Merits and shortcomings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission." In Remembrance and Forgiveness, pp. 34-46. Routledge, 2020.

• Adam, Heribert, and Kanya Adam. "Merits and shortcomings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission." In Remembrance and Forgiveness, pp. 34-46. Routledge, 2020.
• Bessel, Richard. "The Nazi capture of power." journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 169-188.
• Benedict, Susan, and Jochen Kuhla. "Nurses’ participation in the euthanasia programs of Nazi Germany." Western Journal of Nursing Research 21, no. 2 (1999): 246-263.
• Breitman, Richard. "Plans for the final solution in early 1941." German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 483-493.
• Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "SA." Encyclopedia Britannica, November 11, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/SA-Nazi-organization.
• Bunker, Raymond. "Systematic colonization and town planning in Australia and New Zealand." Planning Perspectives 3, no. 1 (1988): 59-80.
• Caldwell, Peter. "National Socialism and Constitutional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter, and the Debate over the Nature of the Nazi State, 1993-1937." Cardozo L. Rev. 16 (1994): 399
• Dunn, Kevin M., James Forrest, Ian Burnley, and Amy McDonald. "Constructing racism in Australia." Australian journal of social issues 39, no. 4 (2004): 409-430.
• Docker, John. "A plethora of intentions: genocide, settler colonialism and historical consciousness in Australia and Britain." The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 1 (2015): 74-89.
• Fitzgerald, Stephanie. Kristallnacht. Capstone, 2017.
• Grodin, Michael A., Erin L. Miller, and Johnathan I. Kelly. "The Nazi physicians as leaders in eugenics and “euthanasia”: Lessons for today." American journal of public health 108, no. 1 (2018): 53-57.
• Hollinsworth, David. Race and racism in Australia. Thomson Learning Australia, 2006.
• Howard-Wagner, Deirdre. "Colonialism and the science of race difference." In TASA and SAANZ 2007 Joint Conference Refereed Conference Proceedings–Public Sociologies: Lessons and Trans-Tasman Comparisons, The Australian Sociological Association. 2007.
• Jalata, Asafa. "The impacts of English colonial terrorism and genocide on Indigenous/Black Australians." Sage Open 3, no. 3 (2013): 2158244013499143.
• Johnson, Mary, and Carol Rittner. "Circles of Hell: Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazis." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548, no. 1 (1996): 123-137.
• Kevles, Daniel J. "Eugenics and human rights." Bmj 319, no. 7207 (1999): 435-438.
• King, Gary, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander F. Wagner. "Ordinary economic voting behavior in the extraordinary election of Adolf Hitler." The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 951-996.
• Kroslak, Daniel. "Nuremberg Laws." The Lawyer Quarterly.-ISSN 8396 (1805): 184-194.
• Lutz, Brenda Davis. "Gypsies as Victims of the Holocaust." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3 (1995): 346-359.
• Monroe, Kristen Renwick. "Cracking the code of genocide: The moral psychology of rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust." Political Psychology 29, no. 5 (2008): 699-736.
• Moses, A. Dirk. "An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89-106.
• Moses, D., & Stone, D. (Eds.). (2013). Colonialism and genocide. Routledge.
• O’Byrne, Darren. "Perpetrators? Political civil servants in the Third Reich." In Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence, pp. 83-98. Routledge, 2018.
• Pohl, Dieter. "The Holocaust and the concentration camps." In Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, pp. 161-178. Routledge, 2009.
• Power, Jonathan. "Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Deputy–From Boyhood to Chief Murderer of the Jews." In Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals, pp. 13-18. Brill Nijhoff, 2017.
• Rippon, Anton. Hitler's Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games. Pen and Sword, 2006.
• Robinson, Shirleene, and Jessica Paten. "The question of genocide and Indigenous child removal: the colonial Australian context." Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (2008): 501-518.
• Rogers, Thomas James, and Stephen Bain. "Genocide and frontier violence in Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. 1 (2016): 83-100.
• Short, Doctor Damien. Redefining genocide: Settler colonialism, social death and ecocide. Zed Books Ltd., 2016.
• Steinacher, Gerald J. "The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence Kim Christian Priemel." (2018): 123-124.
• Torrens, Robert. Colonization of south Australia. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836.
• Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A view of the art of colonization, with present reference to the British Empire. JW Parker, 1849.

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110 Racial Profiling Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best racial profiling topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 most interesting racial profiling topics to write about, 👍 good research topics about racial profiling, ❓ research questions about racial profiling.

• Benefits of Racial Profiling The objective of the essay is to explore the pros of racial profiling and offer argumentative support on the same. From a proponent perspective and as a strong supporter of racial profiling, I am of […]
• Terrorism, Hate Crimes and Racial Profiling The Patriotic Act defines domestic terrorism as an act dangerous to human life, which violates criminal laws of the USA and is aimed to intimidate the civilian population and influence the government policies through coercion […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• The True Danger of Racial Profiling In the context of fig. In turn, while the context of fig.
• Ethics of Racial Profiling in the United States Racial profiling can be referred to as the process of law enforcement personnel identifying someone as a suspect of criminal activity due to the race, nationality, or faith of the individual in question.
• The Issue of Racial Profiling The fact that few stereotypes created by law enforcement agencies can contribute to the more significant levels of racism and discrimination in this sphere. Legal structures that ban race prejudice and may apply to the […]
• Racial Profiling in Cultural Psychology The idea that some cultures are superior to others is compatible with the issue of racial identity non-apparently existing in society.
• The Practice of Racial Profiling The main example is the White drivers who were stopped at a significantly lower rate, as well as the members of the Asian population of the county.
• George Zimmerman Case and Racial Profiling He attested that most of the witnesses in the case had made calls to 991 immediately after the Martin was shot.
• Racial Profiling: Term Definition A study of history can easily reveal the folly of classifying people, in ancient times there used to be a derogatory term that a rich and powerful civilization used to describe others.
• Racial Profiling by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office The ACLU iterates that MCSO deputies are in the habit of “sacrificing the rights and well-being of workers in the name of immigration enforcement”.
• Racial Profiling by Police: Effects and Possible Remedies When the police engage in racial profiling mistrust between the public and the police arises. The causes of such mistrust may be due to poor communication between law enforcement individuals and community members due to […]
• Racial Profiling: Personal Investigation According to Jim, the reason why there is racial profiling is that a lot of black people and Hispanics are involved in crime than white people.
• Racial Profiling Goes Beyond Black and White or Red and Blue As a result of this instant impression, relations between the natives and the Europeans were never given a chance to truly flourish, eventually leading to the near genocide of the native race.
• Policy: Overcoming Racial Profiling The provisions and procedures of the policy are concerned with following the practices and principles of positive change within law enforcement.
• “Everything Isn’t Racial Profiling” by Linda Chavez This thesis is exemplified by such statements as, “But there are times when it makes sense to include race or national origin in a larger, criminal profile, particularly if you are dealing with a crime […]
• Sociological Issues: Racial Profiling Another argument advanced against racial profiling is that it is an inefficient method of ensuring that members of the public are safe.this is because when law enforcement is conducted based on general characteristics such as […]
• Conflict Theory: Racial Profiling The paper is claimed to overview the policy of racial profiling in a particular city, and provide the research, based on the sociological conflict theory, including the information gathered by the means of survey and […]
• Racial Profiling of Italian-Americans in Society Italian Americans are defined as Italian immigrants living in the United States of America or someone born in the United States with an Italian heritage.
• Teenage and Racial Profiling in the United States This paper takes the position that there is an effective solution to reduce or eliminate the prevalence of teenage and racial profiling in a certain place in the US by using the experience of other […]
• Criminal Law: Racial Profiling by Police As a rule, when detecting the primary factors affecting the changes in the racial profiling rates among the representatives of the law enforcement, one brings up the concepts of race and social class, stating that […]
• Racial Profiling in the United States Shelby reveals that the effects of such events have been seen in the reduced number of crimes that have improved the quality of life in the US.
• Racial Profiling and the Killing of Michael Brown The truth is, according to professor Kelley, that the racial homicide and violence committed in these areas is caused by the police and not the black community living in the areas.
• Racial Profiling: Looking Middle Eastern It is important to note that the 19 highjackers of the planes that bombed the Twin Towers were between the age of 18 and 23 years, and were from the Middle East.
• Racial Profiling in America The government, as well as society, used to believe that the use of drugs is a culturally-based phenomenon that served as an excuse to target representatives of color minorities and was considered as the effective […]
• Practice and Concept of Racial Profiling Both of these definitions, of course, were meant to expose the policy of racial profiling as being inheritably wicked and above all – scientifically unsubstantiated, as definitions’ very sounding implies that there is no link […]
• Racial Profiling Towards Arabs in America Although the 9/11 attacks presented lawmakers and enforcers with the problem of ensuring the security of Americans, the practice of racial profiling and racially motivated attacks within the United States quickly emerged and provided a […]
• Critique: “Everything Isn’t Racial Profiling” by Linda Chavez One of the topics on the agenda of the world peace and security, the issue of racial profiling is well worth taking a closer look at.
• Racial Profiling: Discrimination the People of Color The way in which the justice system handled the circumstances behind the death of the black teenager represents a society that is less concerned with the plight of the black minority in the nation.
• Debate on the Racial Profiling in the USA The extent of racial profiling has been studied in some states, for example, in the Arizona Sentinel Investigation of all the vehicles which were stopped in the interstate highway in Florida, “While nearly 705 of […]
• Contemporary Cultural Diversity Issue: Racial Profiling The greatest weakness of this prejudicial consideration is the fact that even when there is no evidence to justify the case, the police treat an individual as a convict. Some of the states in America […]
• We Need More Racial Profiling At Airports
• Racial Profiling the War on Drugs and Urban Poverty
• An Analysis of the Problems of Stereotyping, Discrimination and Racial Profiling
• Racial Profiling: Individual Prejudice or Organizational Protocol
• The Problem of Racial Profiling in the American Criminal Justice System
• Retail Racial Profiling and False Accusation and Arrest for Shoplifting
• The Issue of Racial Profiling and the Problem with African Americans Overreacting
• The Link Between Racial Profiling and Social Diversity
• An Analysis of the Issue of Racial Profiling in the United States of America
• Windy City Racial Profiling Is An Act Of Discrimination
• The Issues of Police Brutality and Racial Profiling in the United States
• An Argument Against Racial Profiling By Police
• African Americans and Police Racial Profiling
• America Needs Racial Profiling Based Upon Ethnicity and National Origin
• Racial Profiling in of Mice and Men by Steinbeck
• The Dangers Of Racial Profiling And Police Brutality
• The Positive and Negative Effects of Racial Profiling
• Racial Profiling In The Criminal Justice System Stevenson University
• An Analysis of Racial Profiling by Ordinary Citizens on Everyday Basis in the United States
• Racism, Racial Profiling, And Discrimination On Behalf Of The Los Angeles
• The American Federal Government Should Take Steps against Racial Profiling
• The Controversial Issue of Racial Profiling: Does It Really Exist
• Stereotypes And Racial Profiling On Society ‘s Perception
• Unrecognized Ignorance in the Story of Racial Profiling in School
• Shoplifting, Racial Profiling, and False Accusation in Retail
• The Truth About Racial Profiling
• Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling
• The Problem of Racial Profiling in the United States
• Racial Profiling Is Unnecessary in Law Enforcement
• An Argument Supporting the Use of Racial Profiling in America for the Security of the People
• Racial Profiling: The Discrimination in America Due to Race and Skin Tone
• Racial Profiling Is The Root Of Dysfunction
• Common Assessment: The Iron Triangle And Racial Profiling
• Racial Profiling in the War on Drugs: Common Sense or Institutional Racism
• Racial Profiling Violates the Constitution
• Victims of Terrorism, Hate Crimes & Racial Profiling
• Racial Profiling : The Great Unfinished Business Of America
• The Issues of Racial Profiling of Minority Motorists in America
• Racial Profiling Of Asians In America
• Racial Profiling is Institutionalized Racism
• Strategies on How the Government Can End Racial Profiling
• The Law Enforcement Strategy Called Racial Profiling and the Debates Related to It
• The Federal Government Should Put an End to Racial Profiling
• The Issue of Racial Profiling in Law Enforcement in the United States
• Should Racial Profiling Be Allowed As A Tool Of The Police
• American History: Racial Profiling and Bias in The Media
• The Elimination of Racial Profiling in the Context of Street Level Crime
• Racial Profiling Versus Criminal Profiling: Is There a Difference
• The History of Racism, Racial Profiling, and Unfair Laws in the United States
• Racial Profiling : The Civil Rights Leader And Former
• Does Contact Racial Profiling Lead to Aggressive Police Conduct?
• Does Racial Profiling Exist?
• How Is Racial Profiling Damaging Our Schools?
• How Does Racial Profiling Violate Civil Rights?
• Is Racial Profiling a Crime?
• How Does Racial Profiling Affect Society?
• Should Patients Undergo Racial Profiling?
• What Is a Good Research Question for Racial Profiling?
• What Is Meant by Racial Profiling?
• What Is an Example of Racial Profiling?
• Which United States Supreme Court Held That, in General, Racial Profiling Is Unconstitutional?
• Does the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Engage in Racial Profiling?
• What Is Racial Profiling in a Sentence?
• Is a Racial Profiling a Recent Problem?
• What Is the Racial Profiling Quizlet?
• How Racial Profiling Led to the Death of Trayvon Martin?
• Racial Profiling: Who Gets It Worse When the Gavel Comes Down?
• What Is Racial Profiling Simple?
• Does Racial Profiling Serve Well?
• How Do You Determine Racial Profiling?
• What Is the Opposite of Racial Profiling?
• Are Racial Profiling and Police Discrimination an Issue?
• What Is the Legal Definition of Racial Profiling?
• Is Racial Profiling Ethical?
• Does Racial Profiling Occur?
• What Does the Constitution Say About Racial Profiling?
• Why Is Ending Racial Profiling Important?
• What Is the Difference Between Behavior Profiling and Racial Profiling?
• Racial Profiling: Individual Prejudice or Organizational Protocol?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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