White supremacy has, and still is, a conflict Americans citizens have to deal with every day. One philosopher by the name of Cornel West, witnessed these conflicts play out in American history. West himself has been spotted on television because he is a part of a prayer group who protests against racism and fascism. Most of his work focuses on liberation theology, philosophy, and issues involving racism. His work also focuses on genealogy, where he questions the origin of ideas from humans. West believes humans can not make up ideas spontaneously, if anything it has to do with history. This also correlates with how or why people act in the way that they do. Modern racism always existed in our society and always will be problematic, because …show more content…
From the beginning of time, humans have found breakthroughs through ‘observation and evidence.’ With that in mind, West further explains why humans were forced to compare things through physical traits. We always found new things relating to science (that end up being right) through observations. Assuming everything we see is right, we look at people’s economic status, attitudes, stereotypes, skin color, and etc. Then our evidence is soon collected so we can judge people. In today’s terms, it is a problem because humans are normalizing the pure observations we make towards people with a different skin color. For example, a boss looking for an employee for a specific occupation. A random person walking into an interview is immediately getting judged by the boss. The boss watches how the person presents oneself, what they look like, and etc. With the observations the boss collects, he might not hire this person because of how he looks. We still live in a time when people won’t hire someone because of their race. This creates problems because, the person looking for a job is out of luck, and the boss missed out on something he needed for his …show more content…
Our whole society-our whole world- functions around those three concepts. But I don’t agree with the idea of people not be able to forget the past. People learn about the past- the past doesn’t come up naturally in one’s mind. I remember hearing a story of two young children. These kids had different skin colors, one was black, and the other was white. But these kids didn’t see the difference in skin color; they only saw the ‘true identity’- their ‘true personality.’ Soon, they were separated because their parents didn’t want them seeing each other anymore. These kids, in this case, were ‘pure.’ And the parents were raised on concepts that were brought up from the past. In the future, when the kids grow up to be adults, they would be considered ‘brainwashed,’ because the parents taught them their ways. This is also a reason why society will never solve this problem of racism because people are raised with those thoughts in their mind. I also do believe this is a reason why people form groups or cliches with people of the same color. They feel more comfortable around people with the same concerns or similarities. They were raised to ‘stick together.’ Many arguments are formed to contradict West’s idea of modern racism, but in reality, all racism starts with one of the three contributors. In other words, it’s a cycle. People will always be influenced by other people, and some will always have ‘racist thoughts’ and that is why we