Racism and Discrimination in society
Racists have a common belief that ‘race’ is the primary determinant of personal traits and capabilities and that certain races hold superiority among others. Racial relations are based on prejudice against the other race. It also results in socioeconomic discrimination, exclusion from freedom and inhuman treatment. Racism results in tragic outcomes where an individual or group is harmed by another person or a local official in a particular area. Clues leading to the causes of racism can only be found if various outcomes from informal, formal and national discrimination are excluded.
In some cases, racial prejudice results in the people from dominant races denying equal opportunities to the minority group. In my case, for example, racial discrimination has been a bad experience in many instances. Racism and discrimination in society can be understood by contrasting trends of different countries. It is possible to identify various forms of racism and the reasons behind its emergence. Racism can better be understood by comparing the US with Brazil and South Africa nations. The case study of the three nations gives a better understanding of the relations existing between Africans and the European descendants and the outcomes of racism.
South Africa, for example, is a country where pervasive discrimination is evident as well as exclusions of the black community who are the majority of the population. The United States, on the other hand, represents policies of racial control in uneven proportions and social discrimination of the Blacks, the minority population. Studying Brazil reveals the Afro-Brazilian community as the main subjects of pervasive and informal discrimination. As a result of the harsh treatments to human based on race in all the three nations, some contests brought about the enactment of rules of relations and debates to seek lasting solutions on the racial divisions (Winant, p.2180).
Apartheid is contributed to by racial domination which acts as a powerful tool to hurt the minority group using social control like in the case of South Africa to its majority population which brought feelings of disgust from the rest of the world. “Jim Crow” was a common term in the nineteenth-century that stereotyped the Black man. The phrase denotes legally enforced as well as familiar confines of Blacks’ rights in the South America nations. Antiapartheid Association in South Africa protested such laws that deprived of a specific racial group of the reasons for equality and inclusivity (Molina et al., p.461). The protests mainly took place between the 1950s and 1980s consisting of also the Civil Rights Movement of the US (Bhopal, p.17). Due to the lack of discriminative laws such as apartheid or Jim Crow in Brazil, there has not been such movements or racial conflicts over time. As such, Afro-Brazilians can be seen to be better off than most of the Blacks in Americans and South African. It can, therefore, be concluded that legal structures are essential in ensuring that racial equality is achieved at great length in any nation. Although legal structures are not the sole contributors to ethnic treatments, they play a vital role that cannot be ignored.
Racial prejudice from the past has always been the bedrock which legal race discriminations have been built, and that explains why the Blacks are still the majority population victimized on the ill-treatment grounds. The demographic variations of the three nations give different racial proportionality outcomes. In the US for example, Blacks population is the minority group with a representation of about 13 per cent (Bhopal, p.20). On the other hand, South Africa gives a reverse proportionality having the whites’ community represent 13 per cent of the total population. Brazil half population represents people with African origin although with different specifications. The difference in the numbers results in varying outcomes in all the three nations. In South Africa for example, the whites have the minority perception of needing to be protected from insecurities of the Black majority (Winant, p.2177). In Brazil, the even mix of the population has benefits in that there lacks legal racism. Slavery could have been a leading contributor to the legal racist practice. White slave owners felt the need to justify their ill treatment to inferior Blacks which brought about subjugation. In the United States, racial prejudice brought about post-abolition discrimination and the consequent enforcement of Jim Crow legislation. In Brazil, the high number of slave deaths was resulted by the existence of tropical diseases that also affected the white population, but that is not to mean that their owners can be exempted from the cause of their loss of life. Slavery, in this case, brought the Blacks into dangerous conditions. Slavery in Brazil brought about prejudice but not apartheid. In general, slavery was a heinous act that resulted in prejudice against the Blacks but certainly did not result in legal racial discrimination for all.
In conclusion, it is evident that there are many factors that could have contributed to the different outcomes in the three nations. In Brazil, for example, the country is considered to be a Catholic society and a form where even the Blacks could be accepted which could be the reason why legal racism did not exist. It is, however, difficult to pin down cultural relations to racial prejudice due to the nature of change from time and place. Racial discrimination is prominent in so many ways, and the heinous treatments are carried on from one generation to another which is why the effects of racism continue to be felt in many nations