Race: definitions, history, and social significance

Race

The first three sources reviewed were retrieved from the Ethics Updates website. The fourth source was obtained from a newspaper.

Sullivan, Andrew. "What's So Bad About Hate?" New York Times. 26 September 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990926mag-hate-essay.html

Andrew Sullivan's article is about how hate is not easy to define, and that it comes in many forms that are complicated and often abstract. Sullivan begins his article by recounting the details of a story that was in the news in 1997, of a group of three white supremacists in Texas that tied a black man to the back of their truck and dragged him to his death. He also mentions the Aryan Nations member who shot a Filipino-American mailman at pointblank range, and the beating of the young gay Matthew Shepard, and the writer ponders about the moment that hate begins in someone. In recent years, "hate" has become a buzz word in the media, and there has been a strong push for strong hate-crime laws and anti-hate legislation. Words like sexism, racism, and homophobia identify the victims, but not the perpetrator, or what anyone is thinking or feeling. Hate is not really defined by anyone. Everyone has some kind of prejudice engrained in them, against some kind of group or another, but the origins of these feelings is often unknown. In some cases where it seems there is a "hate" crime against a certain group, was the hate really aimed at that person for being a certain ethnicity or sexual orientation, or was that simply an outlet for frustration about something else? For example, someone might have a lot of gay friends but not support gay equality, or someone might politically support gay equality but really not want to spend time with gay people. Are these people hateful? "Niche haters," are those that preach or believe very specific hateful doctrines, and will commit often violent crimes against people of certain groups. However, these kinds of people are not representative of the kind of hate that is most common. There are many different shades of hate just like there are different shades of love.

Fish, Stanley. "Reverse Racism: Or How the Pot Got to Call the Kettle Black." Atlantic Monthly. November,1993. http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/fish.discrim.rever.html

Stanley Fish's article is about the belief that affirmative action is a form of reverse racism. Some people believe that in the same way that whites were racist by giving themselves special privileges over black people, blacks are also being racist by claiming special status and privileges. Fish does not believe that this is a valid claim. He gives an example of 1950s southern segregated life, where often times black people thought poorly of the white people and vice versa. However, a distinction is clear between the "hate" the white people feel towards the black, based on ideologies, versus the "hate" the black people feel towards the white, which is based on the experiences they've actually had of white people being hostile and often violent. Because of the social injustices that blacks have experienced, however, this is not reverse racism, it is a move towards equality in a society where blacks and other minorities are still at an unfair disadvantage in life.

Applebome, Peter. "English Unique to Blacks in Officially Recognized." New York Times. 2 December 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/1220ca-black-english.html