Topic of Racism and DiscriminationEssay Preview: Topic of Racism and DiscriminationReport this essayWhat is racism? wrong or right, black or white? The topic of racism and discrimination is a key element in Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s novel “In search of April Raintree” and is mostly expressed through Cheryl Raintree in comparison with the other characters. Racism is defined as; “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that ones own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others” (racism.(n.d.).Dictionary.com).
This is expressed throughout the entire novel but particularly when Cheryl comes to visit. April’s mother in law and her friends treat her her differently because of the colour of her skin. Racism is a prejudice that varies in severity but is experienced by nearly all native peoples because the whites see themselves as a superior. April shows her fear of experiencing discrimination when she states “ she is disavowing the part of her that might be seen as a native, as a disavowal also reflected in her fear of being a mother of brown skinned babies” (117). April’s fear of producing brown skinned babies demonstrates the impact the societies views, discriminations and racist perspective truly effects people even when it comes to producing offspring; she feels this way because she doesn’t want her their brown skin to give away her metis identity that she has digilenty tried to hide but also because she does not want her children to the face the same treatment
†Bertrand Russell, The New Black, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russell’s approach is the same as that of Dred Scott’s in Bremen, which uses simple but very clever interlocking narrative. In her novel, March was a young boy raised by the parents of a couple who are black and he is taken in by a white parent that may be part white but who also believes that the black family has an inferior social status, is accepted by black and Asian families. March is able to understand how Black and Asian cultures interact and understand the implications of some of those concepts, and of the ways that race discrimination can have an impact on society in general. It is important to note that Russell did not use a common language, although the Black and Asian family had to use a common language often, though she said this is not a common enough language because “it’s easier to find common ground”
In Bremen where the father of March is a black male we are able to see how racism is applied by the social, legal and religious institutions to black people as well as for white people
, since this also means that, although black and Asian people are given the same basic cultural support and support, it is unclear whether these support systems are based on the shared social belief systems of race and privilege. In this book it gets more of a picture of the interplay between these cultures, and of the ways that they interact
†Bertrand Russell, The New Black, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bertrand Russell makes the case that white and black people have different experiences of oppression. As stated earlier, he has not shown that Black and Asian cultures share the same basic cultural support and support patterns. He argues that this could be made more clear by pointing to studies by Black women’s groups that show that Black women do not experience oppression under the same social, structural and economic conditions as Black men when it comes to their own and other women’s perspectives
Bertrand Russell believes that this lack of awareness about the systemic racism faced by Black women contributes to the development of the notion that many women are too vulnerable in their own group to bear the burden of oppression and the assumption that they are the ones who are to blame for it. Russell’s writing gives us an opportunity to connect racism to the broader experiences of Black people of colour and to take the opportunity to look into these experiences in a much more nuanced analysis of the underlying causes of oppression, which in turn brings about the way society views it about those black and Asian immigrants, and why it views it negatively for them under the guise of equal rights and equal opportunity.
The primary source of his critique of White nationalism in the Black nationalist movement is the writings of Carl Wiesel and many similar commentators in the social and political press. Carl Wiesel has been writing extensively about the phenomenon of White nationalism in Western media since the mid 90s and has seen it as the result of a movement that was founded almost exclusively on White supremacist ideas. Wiesel has argued that White nationalism has been a long time coming among the Black nationalism adherents who have always had a sense of their own place in the world, and of this place White people have lost out on being allowed to be part of it. This book lays out what Wiesel defines as “the defining characteristic of Black nationalists” and how this can have implications for the development of White nationalism in Western media, how it has been embraced by the “White Left” and whether it has had an impact on Black nationalism in Western media. Wiesel argues that White nationalists and White nationalism has been very closely tied together, that because of White ideologies there were a large number of people who became White nationalists during WWII and that many of these