Racism

5 Pages 1317 Words

Where do thoughts come from? I don’t think there is really one specific answer for this question, but I have often found myself looking for one. It usually happens when I’m at school, volleyball practice or sometimes while thinking quietly to myself that my mind begins to wander off and ends up in a place I never thought it would be. Immediately I am puzzled about how and why I arrived at this point. I then try to retrace the steps of my thought process in an attempt to discover how, for example, I am so affixiated on what shoes I wore two days go in the middle of taking a math exam. This process of “spacing out” is similar to thought I process I had when choosing a topic for this paper. Although I have never read Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, while reading the introduction for this novel, I began to think about the origin of racism. Not just when racism began during the days of slavery or the Holocaust, but actually where the word race came from and why it was associated with the discrimination of people.
I began to think about the word’s true definition. The concept of race is by no means a new concept, and is one that has come up recently in many of my classes. On the first day of my American Studies 185 class my professor wrote the word language on the blackboard. My professor then defined it as loaded, having baggage and carrying many different meanings. Never having heard language described in this way, my professors’ statement intrigued me. I thought about not only the many different languages which are spoken right here in America, but how within one language a single word can and does have many different meanings. Such meanings go beyond the definitions found in a dictionary because a word in any language is assigned a different meaning each time it is spoken and heard. A word becomes either negative or positive based on the tone in which it is said or the way in which it is perceived. It is ...