Global Structures and Local Cultures - Essay Example

We would start with looking into the definitions racism to determine, what exactly racism is. Building upon it, we would drill down into the matter that what is considered by us as racism and what really is racism but is not considered by us as so. In the end, we would be inquiring for the reasons of such a continuous racism in the human history. This definition thus shows that usually racism is considered as racism only when the racist feelings are executed by the racist. The very word racism connotes some feeling on the basis of race, but since over the history, we have observed such feelings by the majority, as only the majority could execute such feelings, the notion of racism is made limited, by the people, only to those who have such prejudices and are in a position to execute them.

However, from the sociological point of view, we would be taking the definition of the racism as the feeling that one's race is superior to others', regardless of the fact that whether those feelings were executed or not. (Bell and Blumenfeld 1995) It is one of the major stereotypes regarding racism that only Whites are the racist. Such feelings are quite evident from the literature written over the period of time. (Miles and Brown 2003) It is however a noteworthy fact that whenever we talk about racism, we have in our mind the execution of the racist feelings.

It is a common stereotype that we always consider the party showing the racial behavior is bad while the party to whom such behavior is shown is nice. (Carter 2000) This stereotype has been developed because we have seen the so-called racist from the perspective of the victim. But if we change the perspective, we may find that this is not always the battle of good and evil, nice or vile. People have a habit to look at everything from the perspective of discreteness, to look everything as black or white, people tend to ignore gray areas, as a result of it this perspective has been developed and rooted very firmly in the mind of people that the person who shows racist behavior is evil while since another party is victim so being the victim makes that party as good and non-racist.

Now, it is the time to look at the matter from a neutral point of view. In this regards, first of all we need to determine that execution of the racist feeling does not make a person racist, only the existence of such feeling makes it so. Secondly we need to make it sure that the so-called racist can also be nice, depending on the victim of the racism, the standpoint of the racists etc. (Leone 1978) There may be