Ashley Nelson

2/12/16

Its safe to say that the concept of race enters our lives everyday, one way or
another. Were confronted with this idea of racism and racists. Who is the racist and who
is the target? Who ends up getting blamed for this racism? How did it come to be and is
race something that truly divides us? To address these questions we must first take a look
at history. The ways life operates todays very much correlates with the past. Race is
something that completely dominates all aspects of ours everyday lives. (Lopez, pg.192)
So it is something that is very important to take a deeper look at.
Debatably, however, no one really seems to know what race actually is. There is
little proof of there being any scientific differences among races and in fact there are
more differences between people of the same race that with compared to someone of a
different skin color. (Lopez, pg. 194) Rather than race being something that has a
scientific derivative it is something that has been socially constructed throughout history.
(Lopez, pg.196) Race is something that has been constructed by man in order to
maintain hierarchies and justify the actions of colonizers.
This essay is going examine the various ways in which race has been socially
constructed. Race is socially constructed through our history of language and institutions.
Race was created in order to dominate them while protecting us. There must be an
other in order to give out an easy target, there by homologizing people of completely
different backgrounds together due to arbitrary attributes and ancestry.

Language evolves throughout history in aggregation to politics and economics

and will continue to change. Not only does language help us express ideas and concepts it
also manipulates our thoughts. (Moore, pg. 311) Language plays a huge role in the way
race has been socially constructed.
The very color black has a definition that contains wicked, sinful, and disgraceful,
while in the definition of white youll find pure, free from evil intent. (Moore, pg. 312)
From childhood were taught that black is bad and white is good. An example of this is
seen in the childrens TV show Captain Scarlet, where the villain is captain black and the
hero is Colonel White. (Moore, pg.312) Associating these colors with particular
personalities or characters, children are being trained to see black as a negative, without
having any legitimate racist thoughts.
Its not only language that includes the color of black and white it is also the
perspective in which language is used. This often causes a distortion of information
among an audience or reader. (Moore, pg. 312) For example the way in which we
describe a situation such as the way salves came to be in America. In textbooks we often
find that slaves were brought over on ships from Africa. When in reality they were stolen
from their homes, stacked on top of one another on packed ships and forcibly integrated
into slave labor in the south. There are ways that words can be omitted or distorted in
order to justify the actions of the white man.
And thirdly this essay will examine the language used in politics. There are terms
that weve coined in order to label people who live in third world countries, which
happen to primarily, contain people of color. Culturally deprived, economically
deprived, and underdeveloped. (Moore, pg. 314) These terms distort reality and

should be replaced in order to represent a more accurate representation of history. The

nations that are traditionally dubbed these terms are those that suffered under oppression
of the colonial era. (Moore, pg. 315) So rather than coining these nations as
underdeveloped they should be known for the extreme rate at which they were overly
oppressed. (Moore, pg. 315)
These distortions of reality truly refelect the jusfication that European settlers
need in order to continue on in slave trade and the unjust practices of
Not only does the language we use in our everyday lives shape the thoughts we
have about race and racism, but also institutions are there to hold those thoughts and
ideals in line.

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