Major Issues on Culture and Racism - Essay Example

Culture and Racism Culture will only thrive if only it keeps providing forms of communicating and understanding that have relevance to that specific situation and group. A group having such a culture is hard to suppress since it is easily organized, innovative, difficult to be tricked and is confident. For a group to be suppressed, you must first suppress its cultural practices. This is an aspect of tension of racism which on one hand leads to splitting of people into specific groups and aids in maintaining their being separate. On the other hand it will always cause interference to the lives of the members of the races in oppression, thus preventing their development by disrupting their culture. It’s only a small number of academics today who take themselves as racists, and if you called somebody a racist would be deemed offensive. Yet racism is almost found everywhere in various cultures, just as dangerous and pervasive as it was centuries ago.Currently, there seems to be lots of racism but few racist. How can we explain this paradox? Racism is a type of practice that has had tremendous and profound importance in the European society for several centuries. It has importance in the fact that it is a crucial aspect of the manner in which the European system of capitalism maintains itself. Racist practice, just like all practices has got a dominant group, system advantage ,cognized,justified,rationalized by either a theory or a system of belief and racial bigotry regarding reality’s nature and the appropriate behavior for this cognized reality. An academic racist in today’s world can be accused of believing in such things as objectification, biological, hereditary superiority of people of a certain ethnicity over persons of another particular race, implying that discrimination is rationalized, explained, justified, by the biological theory underlying. However nobody believes in this theory any more. In the world of today, we have few racists and more racism. Most academics are of the belief that the members of what was known as inferior and marginalized races have an equal capacity of the so-called privileged races, but have not succeeded to make a realization of this capacity. Their culture has not permitted them to learn things that they need so that they can be treated equally. They have not endeavored to think rationally nor have they behaved in ways that are appropriate as social adults. Thus the issue here is culture and not biology, and naturally inequality will disappear with time. In the meantime however, discrimination is well justified. In the newer theory, discrimination is not used and is an issue of taking every individual in a manner that is commensurate to his/her abilities. Thus the people of one ethnic group will demonstrate abilities that are greater than those of other races, IQ abilities, SAT and ACT test taking. By the fact that these have abilities that are higher realized, they ought to be rewarded greatly, get college admissions, granted PhDs and so forth. Thus there is persistence of racist practice under the regulation of a theory that usually denies race relevance. The differences amongst human beings justifying discriminatory treatment are mostly differences in acquired traits, actually in culture. Additionally we can also claim that cultural racism may substitute the cultural category “European” taking the place of racial category “white”. We no longer therefore have a superior and privileged race but instead a superior culture. Notwithstanding all this, biological racism still remained respectable till the 1950s and 1960s, which was the classical period of struggles for civil rights and national liberation. Thus racist practice had to come up with a new theory. During this period, there was assignment of mainstream scholarship and jobs and funds were provided, quite literally, which was the task for the formulation of theoretical structure thus enabling rationalization of continued dominance of colored communities at home and in the third world. A theory such as that would have to do with two propositions that were anti-biological-racist and also axiomatic in communities that were Non-European that though privileged, Europeans are not necessarily innately superior, and that economic empowerment and development can bring Europeans and non-Europeans to similar level. The issue was to prove that even though non-Europeans are actually equal to Europeans in terms of innate capacity, cannot make any economical development equal to the level of Europeans, unless these specific societies would voluntarily agree to neocolonialism which is continued dominion by European corporations and countries. The result of this massive theory-building antics was “modernization theory”. This theory made an argument that it’s not that non-Europeans are racially inferior, but are rather backward culturally when compared to Europeans due to their history: their less evolution of culture. This is the main reason therefore why they are in poor state. That’s why they must follow under the “tutelage” and guidance of European, which is an already well trodden path by Europeans so as to overcome backwardness. Thus non-Europeans were therefore defined as inferior not in terms of potential for achievement but in terms of attained level of achievement. This therefore is essence that constitutes real cultural racism. Cultural racism when taken as a theory has to prove the superiority and privileges of Europeans, and has to execute it without recourse to the much older arguments ranging from biology and religion. How is this executed? This can be done by recourse to history and building a characteristic theory of historical culture. The argument here is that almost all important innovations in culture which have historically generated progress in culture first occurred in Europe and then diffused afterwards to non-European societies. This means that each particular moment in history, Europeans have always been advanced more than the non-Europeans in the whole development of culture and also more progressive and advanced than the non-Europeans. This is taken as a big bundle of apparently empirical about innovation and invention, not just technological and material traits but also social and political traits such as the family, state and the market. The narrators of this story have saturated history with so many European inventions and European progressiveness. Modern diffusionism depicts a situation whereby Europeans always have been portrayed as being the most progressive individuals whereas non-Europeans have been seen as backward, and are always permanently the recipients of development ideas, people and things from Europe. It thus goes without saying that periphery progress, as has been in the past, must be made up of continuous diffusion of “rationality” and institutions, European control and culture. The periphery is made up of the Third World which includes minorities of Third World embedded in European-dominated such as the United States, in reservations, in ghettos, migrant-labor camps and prisons. In these days we have few racists and so much racism, yet cultural racism is always not propagated by individuals we would most likely label as “racists”. The doctrine here is theory, and not necessarily prejudice. Those scholars that advocated for one or another type of it are persons who believed that they were involved with facts, together with policy implications regarding these facts. Most of these reject prejudice and cannot be prejudiced. Their belief is simply that there are empirical reasons that are straightforward, firmly grounded in culture differences and which try to make an explanation as to why some individuals and groups are backward. Finally it is crucial to differentiate between statements which simply imply that some culture characteristics thrive for longer timelines and those that assert some old, tenacious, culture characteristics that explain the superiority of a certain culture and inferiority of the other one. Change is constant and normal condition in many human cultures. If change is missing, it could be either due to the unwillingness of a certain culture to discard some treasured traits or due to impinging circumstances and therefore have no other choice. Work cited Damion, Waymer. Culture,Social Class,and Race in Public Relations:Perspectives and Applications. New York: Lexington Books, 2012. Read More