Racism is a form of discrimination against people of color based on their genetic appearances, such as skin color, making them feel inferior to the dominant race. Racism became part of the governing belief of civilization as a result of the African slave trade at the beginning of capitalism. Racial discrimination mainly results in the unfair treatment of people based on their culture, skin color, and place of origin. Bearing this definition in mind, I believe that slavery was the root cause of racism. The black color of African American people scared and repelled the white people. The whites felt to be more superior compared to black people. To them, black color signified low physical and mental abilities. The expansion of the slave trade at the end of the seventeenth century, notions of black inferiority flourished ( Wallis, 2016). The slave owners propagate that the black people are were not complete human beings and were a different species from the rest of humanity. The Europeans saw the Africans as only suitable for oppression. At the end of the reconstruction era, the black codes and the Jim Crow laws legalized and categorized racial discrimination into an iron cage across the country, which hindered the black from escaping ( Bennett-Alexander & Hartman, 2019).
Also, the skin color resulted in racial discrimination between the Europeans and the African people. People naturally treat others differently based on society's allegations, which come with the ethnic connotations attached to skin color (Wallis, 2016). Color highlights biases that thrive between individuals from different cultural groups as well as biases that proliferate between persons from similar ethnic communities. It is that believed that people with white complexion are considered to be better-looking and respected compared to dark-skinned people. Worth noting is that the Europeans noted that the physical appearance of the blacks was so prominently different from the color and regarded themselves more superior beings and hence associated most of the undesirable features with blacks (Wallis, 2016).
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References
Bennett-Alexander, D., and Hartman, L. (2019). Employment Law for Business (9th ed.). NY: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-1-259-72233-2.
Wallis, J. (2016). America's original sin: Racism, white privilege, and the bridge to a new America . Brazos Press.