Racism, Slavery And Personal Views On Today’s Political Correctness

Abstract

Racism is the belief that humans are subdivided into distinct hereditary groups that are innately different in their social behavior and mental capacities and that can therefore be ranked as superior or inferior. Racist thinking presumes that differences among groups are innate and not subjective to change. Although beliefs in the superiority and inferiority of different groups have been historically persistent in human societies, the belief that such differences are linked to racial types is a relatively new idea, which did not arise forcefully until the eighteenth century in Europe. Slavery in America started in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 African slaves ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to African slaves as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans. Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the slave population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South. Relations between blacks and whites took on a more confrontational and violent tone during the early 1900s than at any previous time. Nowadays we use political correctness as an instrument that disguise “tolerance”, an instrument that is no longer “correct”, but abusive.

Keywords

• racism
• slavery
• political correctness
• personal views

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