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Essay Topics on Racism: 150 Ideas for Analysis and Discussion

Here’s a list of 150 essay ideas on racism to help you ace a perfect paper. The subjects are divided based on what you require!

Before we continue with the list of essay topics on racism, let's remember the definition of racism. In brief, it's a complex prejudice and a form of discrimination based on race. It can be done by an individual, a group, or an institution. If you belong to a racial or ethnic group, you are facing being in the minority. As it's usually caused by the group in power, there are many types of racism, including socio-cultural racism, internal racism, legal racism, systematic racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and historical racism. You can also find educational or economic racism as there are many sub-sections that one can encounter.

150 Essay Topics on Racism to Help You Ace a Perfect Essay

General Recommendations

The subject of racism is one of the most popular among college students today because you can discuss it regardless of your academic discipline. Even though we are dealing with technical progress and the Internet, the problem of racism is still there. The world may go further and talk about philosophical matters, yet we still have to face them and explore the challenges. It makes it even more difficult to find a good topic that would be unique and inspiring. As a way to help you out, we have collected 150 racism essay topics that have been chosen by our experts. We recommend you choose something that motivates you and narrow things down a little bit to make your writing easier.

Why Choose a Topic on Racial Issues? 

When we explore racial issues, we are not only seeking the most efficient solutions but also reminding ourselves about the past and the mistakes that we should never make again. It is an inspirational type of work as we all can change the world. If you cannot choose a topic that inspires you, think about recent events, talk about your friend, or discuss something that has happened in your local area. Just take your time and think about how you can make the world a safer and better place.

The Secrets of a Good Essay About Racism 

The secret to writing a good essay on racism is not only stating that racism is bad but by exploring the origins and finding a solution. You can choose a discipline and start from there. For example, if you are a nursing student, talk about the medical principles and responsibilities where every person is the same. Talk about how it has not always been this way and discuss the methods and the famous theorists who have done their best to bring equality to our society. Keep your tone inspiring, explore, and tell a story with a moral lesson in the end. Now let’s explore the topic ideas on racism!

General Essay Topics On Racism 

As we know, no person is born a racist since we are not born this way and it cannot be considered a biological phenomenon. Since it is a practice that is learned and a social issue, the general topics related to racism may include socio-cultural, philosophical, and political aspects as you can see below. Here are the ideas that you should consider as you plan to write an essay on racial issues:

• Are we born with racial prejudice? 
• Can racism be unlearned? 
• The political constituent of the racial prejudice and the colonial past? 
• The humiliation of the African continent and the control of power. 
• The heritage of the Black Lives Matter movement and its historical origins. 
• The skin color issue and the cultural perceptions of the African Americans vs Mexican Americans. 
• The role of social media in the prevention of racial conflicts in 2022 . 
• Martin Luther King Jr. and his role in modern education. 
• Konrad Lorenz and the biological perception of the human race. 
• The relation of racial issues to nazism and chauvinism.

The Best Racism Essay Topics 

School and college learners often ask about what can be considered the best essay subject when asked to write on racial issues. Essentially, you have to talk about the origins of racism and provide a moral lesson with a solution as every person can be a solid contribution to the prevention of hatred and racial discrimination.

• The schoolchildren's example and the attitude to the racial conflicts. 
• Perception of racism in the United States versus Germany. 
• The role of the scouting movement as a way to promote equality in our society. 
•  Social justice and the range of opportunities that African American individuals could receive during the 1960s.
•  The workplace equality and the negative perception of the race when the documents are being filed. 
•  The institutional racism and the sources of the legislation that has paved the way for injustice. 
•  Why should we talk to the children about racial prejudice and set good examples ? 
•  The role of anthropology in racial research during the 1990s in the USA. 
•  The Black Poverty phenomenon and the origins of the Black Culture across the globe. 
•  The controversy of Malcolm X’s personality and his transition from anger to peacemaking.

Shocking Racism Essay Ideas 

Unfortunately, there are many subjects that are not easy to deal with when you are talking about the most horrible sides of racism. Since these subjects are sensitive, dealing with the shocking aspects of this problem should be approached with a warning in your introduction part so your readers know what to expect. As a rule, many medical and forensic students will dive into the issue, so these topic ideas are still relevant:

• The prejudice against wearing a hoodie. 
•  The racial violence in Western Africa and the crimes by the Belgian government. 
•  The comparison of homophobic beliefs and the link to racial prejudice. 
•  Domestic violence and the bias towards the cases based on race. 
•  Racial discrimination in the field of the sex industry. 
•  Slavery in the Middle East and the modern cultural perceptions. 
•  Internal racism in the United States: why the black communities keep silent. 
•  Racism in the American schools: the bias among the teachers. 
•  Cyberbullying and the distorted image of the typical racists . 
•  The prisons of Apartheid in South Africa.

Light and Simple Ideas Regarding Racism

If you are a high-school learner or a first-year college student, your essay on racism may not have to represent complex research with a dozen of sources. Here are some good ideas that are light and simple enough to provide you with inspiration and the basic points to follow:

• My first encounter with racial prejudice. 
•  Why do college students are always in the vanguard of social campaigns? 
•  How are the racial issues addressed by my school? 
•  The promotion of the African-American culture is a method to challenge prejudice and stereotypes. 
• The history of blues music and the Black culture of the blues in the United States.
• The role of slavery in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. 
•  School segregation in the United States during the 1960s. 
•  The negative effect of racism on the mental health of a person. 
•  The advocacy of racism in modern society . 
•  The heritage of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the modern perception of the historical issues.

Interesting Topics on Racism For an Essay 

Contrary to the popular belief, when you have to talk about the cases of racial prejudice, you will also encounter many interesting essay topic ideas. As long as these are related to your main academic course, you can explore them. Here are some great ideas to consider:

• Has the perception of Michael Jackson changed because of his skin transition? 
•  The perception of racial problems by the British Broadcasting Corporation. 
•  The role of the African American influencers on Instagram. 
•  The comparison between the Asian students and the Mexican learners in the USA. 
•  Latin culture and the similarities when compared to the Black culture with its peculiarities. 
•  The racial impact in the “Boy In The Stripped Pajamas”. 
•  Can we eliminate racism completely and how exactly, considering the answer is “Yes”? 
•  Scientific research of modern racism and social media campaigns. 
•  Why do some people believe that the Black Lives Matter movement is controversial? 
• Male vs female challenges in relation to racial attitudes.

Argumentative Essay Topics About Race 

An argumentative type of writing requires making a clear statement or posing an assumption that will deal with a particular question. As we are dealing with racial prejudice or theories, it is essential to support your writing with at least one piece of evidence to make sure that you can support your opinion and stand for it as you write. Here are some good African American argumentative essay examples of topics and other ideas to consider:

•  Racism is a mental disorder and cannot be treated with words alone. 
•  Analysis of the traumatic experiences based on racial prejudice. 
•  African-American communities and the sense of being inferior are caused by poverty. 
•  Reading the memoirs of famous people that describe racial issues often provides a distorted image through the lens of a single person. 
•  There is no academic explanation of racism since every case is different and is often based on personal perceptions. 
•  The negatives of the post-racial perception as the latent system that advocates racism. 
•  The link of racial origins to the concept of feminism and gender inequality. 
•  The military bias and the merits that are earned by the African-American soldiers. 
•  The media causes a negative image of the Latin and Mexican youth in the United States. 
•  Does racism exist in kindergarten and why the youngsters do not think about racial prejudice?

Racism Research Paper Topics 

Dealing with The Black Lives Matter essay , you should focus on those aspects of racism that are not often discussed or researched by the media. You can take a particular case study or talk about the reasons why the BLM social campaign has started and whether the timing has been right. Here are some interesting racism topics for research paper that you should consider:

• The link of criminal offenses to race is an example of the primary injustice .  
• The socio-emotional burdens of slavery that one can trace among the representatives of the African-American population. 
• Study of the cardio-vascular diseases among the American youth: a comparison of the Caucasian and Latin representatives. 
• The race and the politics: dealing with the racial issues and the Trump administration analysis. 
• The best methods to achieve medical equality for all people: where race has no place to be. 
• The perception of racism by the young children: the negative side of trying to educate the youngsters. 
• Racial prejudice in the UK vs the United States: analysis of the core differences. 
• The prisons in the United States: why do the Blacks constitute the majority? 
• The culture of Voodoo and the slavery: the link between the occult practices.
• The native American people and the African Americans: the common woes they share.

Racism in Culture Topics 

Racism topics for essay in culture are always upon the surface because we can encounter them in books, popular political shows, movies, social media, and more. The majority of college students often ignore this aspect because things easily become confusing since one has to take a stand and explain the point. As a way to help you a little bit, we have collected several cultural racism topic ideas to help you start:

• The perception of wealth by the Black community: why it differs when researched through the lens of past poverty?  
• The rap music and the cultural constituent of the African-American community. 
• The moral constituent of the political shows where racial jargon is being used. 
• Why the racial jokes on television are against the freedom of speech?  
• The ways how the modern media promotes racism by stirring up the conflict and actually doing harm. 
• The isolated cases of racism and police violence in the United States as portrayed by the movies. 
• Playing with the Black musicians: the history of jazz in the United States. 
• The social distancing and the perception of isolation by the different races. 
• The cultural multitude in the cartoons by the Disney Corporations: the pros and cons.
• From assimilation to genocide: can the African American child make it big without living through the cultural bias?

Racism Essay Ideas in Literature 

One of the best ways to study racism is by reading the books by those who have been through it on their own or by studying the explorations by those who can write emotionally and fight for racial equality where racism has no place to be. Keeping all of these challenges in mind, our experts suggest turning to the books as you can explore racism in the literature by focusing on those who are against it and discussing the cases in the classic literature that are quite controversial.

• The racial controversy of Ernest Hemingway's writing.  
• The personal attitude of Mark Twain towards slavery and the cultural peculiarities of the times. 
• The reasons why "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee book has been banned in libraries. 
• The "Hate You Give" by Angie Thomas and the analysis of the justified and "legit" racism. 
• Is the poetry by the gangsta rap an example of hidden racism? 
• Maya Angelou and her timeless poetry. 
• The portrayal of xenophobia in modern English language literature. 
• What can we learn from the "Schilder's List" screenplay as we discuss the subject of genocide? 
• Are there racial elements in "Othello" or Shakespeare's creation is beyond the subject?
• Kate Chopin's perception of inequality in "Desiree's Baby".

Racism in Science Essay Ideas 

Racism is often studied by scientists because it's not only a cultural point or a social agenda that is driven by personal inferiority and similar factors of mental distortion. Since we can talk about police violence and social campaigns, it is also possible to discuss things through different disciplines. Think over these racism thesis statement ideas by taking a scientific approach and getting a common idea explained:

• Can physical trauma become a cause for a different perception of race? 
• Do we inherit racial intolerance from our family members and friends? 
• Can a white person assimilate and become a part of the primarily Black community? 
• The people behind the concept of Apartheid: analysis of the critical factors. 
• Can one prove the fact of the physical damage of the racial injustice that lasted through the years? 
• The bond between mental diseases and the slavery heritage among the Black people. 
• Should people carry the blame for the years of social injustice? 
• How can we explain the metaphysics of race? 
• What do the different religions tell us about race and the best ways to deal with it? 
• Ethnic prejudices based on age, gender, and social status vs general racism.

Cinema and Race Topics to Write About 

As a rule, the movies are also a great source for writing an essay on racial issues. Remember to provide the basic information about the movie or include examples with the quotations to help your readers understand all the major points that you make. Here are some ideas that are worth your attention:

• The negative aspect of the portrayal of racial issues by Hollywood.  
• Should the disturbing facts and the graphic violence be included in the movies about slavery? 
• Analysis of the "Green Mile" movie and the perception of equality in our society.  
• The role of music and culture in the "Django Unchained" movie. 
• The "Ghosts of Mississippi" and the social aspect of the American South compared to how we perceive it today. 
• What can we learn from the "Malcolm X" movie created by Spike Lee? 
• "I am Not Your Negro" movie and the role of education through the movies. 
• "And the Children Shall Lead" the movie as an example that we are not born racist. 
• Do we really have the "Black Hollywood" concept in reality? 
• Do the movies about racial issues only cause even more racial prejudice?

Race and Ethnic Relations 

Another challenging problem is the internal racism and race and ethnicity essay topics that we can observe not only in the United States but all over the world as well. For example, the Black people in the United States and the representatives of the rap music culture will divide themselves between the East Coast and the West Coast where far more than cultural differences exist. The same can be encountered in Afghanistan or in Belgium. Here are some essay topics on race and ethnicity idea samples to consider:

• The racial or the ethnic conflict? What can we learn from Afghan society? 
• Religious beliefs divide us based on ethnicity . 
• What are the major differences between ethnic and racial conflicts? 
• Why we are able to identify the European Black person and the Black coming from the United States? 
• Racism and ethnicity's role in sports. 
• How can an ethnic conflict be resolved with the help of anti-racial methods? 
• The medical aspect of being an Asian in the United States. 
• The challenges of learning as an African American person during the 1950s. 
• The role of the African American people in the Vietnam war and their perception by the locals. 
• Ethnicity's role in South Africa as the concept of Apartheid has been formed.

Biology and Racial Issues 

If you are majoring in Biology or would like to research this side of the general issue of race, it is essential to think about how we can fight racism in practice by turning to healthcare or the concepts that are historical in their nature. Although we cannot explain slavery per se other than by turning to economics and the rule of power that has no justification, biologists believe that racial challenges can be approached by their core beliefs as well.

• Can we create an isolated non-racist society in 2022? 
• If we assume that a social group has never heard of racism, can it occur? 
• The physical versus cultural differences in the racial inequality cases? 
• The biological peculiarities of the different races? 
• Do we carry the cultural heritage of our race? 
• Interracial marriage through the lens of Biology. 
• The origins of the racial concept and its evolution. 
• The core ways how slavery has changed the African-American population. 
• The linguistic peculiarities of the Latin people. 
• The resistance of the different races towards vaccination.

Modern Racism Topics to Consider 

In case you would like to deal with a modern subject that deals with racism, you can go beyond the famous Black Lives Matter movement by focusing on the cases of racism in sports or talking about the peacemakers or the famous celebrities who have made a solid difference in the elimination of racism.

• The Global Citizen campaign is a way to eliminate racial differences. 
• The heritage of Aretha Franklin and her take on the racial challenges. 
• The role of the Black Stars in modern society: the pros and cons. 
• Martin Luther King Day in the modern schools. 
• How can Instagram help to eliminate racism? 
• The personality of Michelle Obama as a fighter for peace. 
• Is a society without racism a utopian idea? 
• How can comic books help youngsters understand equality? 
• The controversy in the death of George Floyd. 
• How can we break down the stereotypes about Mexicans in the United States?

Racial Discrimination Essay Ideas 

If your essay should focus on racial discrimination, you should think about the environment and the type of prejudice that you are facing. For example, it can be in school or at the workplace, at the hospital, or in a movie that you have attended. Here are some discrimination topics research paper ideas that will help you to get started:

• How can a schoolchild report the case of racism while being a minor?  
• The discrimination against women's rights during the 1960s. 
• The employment problem and the chances of the Latin, Asian, and African American applicants. 
• Do colleges implement a certain selection process against different races? 
• How can discrimination be eliminated via education? 
• African-American challenges in sports. 
• The perception of discrimination, based on racial principles and the laws in the United States. 
• How can one report racial comments on social media? 
• Is there discrimination against white people in our society? 
• Covid-19 and racial discrimination: the lessons we have learned.

Find Even More Essay Topics On Racism by Visiting Our Site 

If you are unsure about what to write about, you can always find an essay on racism by visiting our website. Offering over 150 topic ideas, you can always get in touch with our experts and find another one!

5 Tips to Make Your Essay Perfect

• Start your essay on racial issues by narrowing things down after you choose the general topic. 
• Get your facts straight by checking the dates, the names, opinions from both sides of an issue, etc. 
• Provide examples if you are talking about the general aspects of racism. 
• Do not use profanity and show due respect even if you are talking about shocking things. The same relates to race and ethnic relations essay topics that are based on religious conflicts. Stay respectful! 
• Provide references and citations to avoid plagiarism and to keep your ideas supported by at least one piece of evidence.

Recommendations to Help You Get Inspired

Speaking of recommended books and articles to help you start with this subject, you should check " The Ideology of Racism: Misusing Science to Justify Racial Discrimination " by William H. Tucker who is a professor of social sciences at Rutgers University. Once you read this great article, think about the poetry by Maya Angelou as one of the best examples to see the practical side of things.

The other recommendations worth checking include:

- How to be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi . - White Fragility by Robin Diangelo . - So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo .

The Final Word 

We sincerely believe that our article has helped you to choose the perfect essay subject to stir your writing skills. If you are still feeling stuck and need additional help, our team of writers can assist you in the creation of any essay based on what you would like to explore. You can get in touch with our skilled experts anytime by contacting our essay service for any race and ethnicity topics. Always confidential and plagiarism-free, we can assist you and help you get over the stress!

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How to Talk About Race on College Applications, According to Admissions Experts

R afael Figueroa, dean of college guidance at Albuquerque Academy, was in the middle of tutoring Native American and Native Hawaiian students on how to write college application essays when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious college admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional .

Earlier in the week, he told the students that they shouldn’t feel like they need to talk about their ethnicity in their essays. But after the June 29 Supreme Court ruling , he backtracked. “If I told you that you didn’t have to write about your native or cultural identity, you need to get ready to do another supplemental essay” on it or prepare a story that can fit into short answer questions, he says he told them.

For high school seniors of color applying to colleges in the coming years, the essay and short answer sections will take on newfound importance. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested as much when he wrote in his majority opinion, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” That “discussion” is usually in an essay, and many colleges have additional short-answer questions that allow students to expand more on their background and where they grew up.

“The essay is going to take up a lot more space than maybe it has in the past because people are going to be really trying to understand who this person is that is going to come into our community,” says Timothy Fields, senior associate dean of undergraduate admission at Emory University.

Now, college admissions officers are trying to figure out how to advise high schoolers on their application materials to give them the best chance to showcase their background under the new rules, which will no longer allow colleges or universities to use race as an explicit factor in admissions decisions .

Shereem Herndon-Brown, who co-wrote The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions with Fields, says students of color can convey their racial and ethnic backgrounds by writing about their families and their upbringing. “I’ve worked with students for years who have written amazing essays about how they spend Yom Kippur with their family, which clearly signals to a college that they are Jewish—how they listened to the conversations from their grandfather about escaping parts of Europe… Their international or immigrant story comes through whether it’s from the Holocaust or Croatia or the Ukraine. These are stories that kind of smack colleges in the face about culture.”

“Right now, we’re asking Black and brown kids to smack colleges in the face about being Black and brown,” he continues. “And, admittedly, I am mixed about the necessity to do it. But I think the only way to do it is through writing.”

Read More: The ‘Infamous 96’ Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

Students of color who are involved in extracurriculars that are related to diversity efforts should talk about those prominently in their college essays, other experts say. Maude Bond, director of college counseling at Cate School in Santa Barbara County, California, cites one recent applicant she counseled who wrote her college essay about an internship with an anti-racism group and how it helped her highlight the experiences of Asian American Pacific Islanders in the area.

Bond also says there are plenty of ways for people of color to emphasize their resilience and describe the character traits they learned from overcoming adversity: “Living in a society where you’re navigating racism every day makes you very compassionate.” she says. “It gives you a different sense of empathy and understanding. Not having the same resources as people that you grow up with makes you more creative and innovative.” These, she argues, are characteristics students should highlight in their personal essays.

Adam Nguyen, a former Columbia University admissions officer who now counsels college applicants via his firm Ivy Link, will also encourage students of color to ask their teachers and college guidance counselors to hint at their race or ethnicity in their recommendation letters. “That’s where they could talk about your racial background,” Nguyen says. “Just because you can’t see what’s written doesn’t mean you can’t influence how or what is said about you.”

Yet as the essay portions of college applications gain more importance, the process of reading applications will take a lot longer, raising the question of whether college admissions offices have enough staffers to get through the applications. “There are not enough admission officers in the industry to read that way,” says Michael Pina, director of admission at the University of Richmond.

That could make it even more difficult for students to get the individual attention required to gain acceptance to the most elite colleges. Multiple college admissions experts say college-bound students will need to apply to a broader range of schools. “You should still apply to those 1% of colleges…but you should think about the places that are producing high-quality graduates that are less selective,” says Pina.

One thing more Black students should consider, Fields argues, is applying to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). (In fact, Fields, a graduate of Morehouse College, claims that may now be “necessary” for some students.) “There’s something to be said, for a Black person to be in a majority environment someplace that they are celebrated, not tolerated,” Fields says. “There’s something to be said about being in an environment where you don’t have to justify why you’re here.”

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SCOTUS Says You Can Discuss Race in Your College Essay. Should You?

The us supreme court banned colleges’ affirmative action admission practices, raising a question about students writing about race in their college essay.

Although the Supreme Court says college application essays may discuss race and disadvantage, BU experts say inauthentic or traumatic recollections won’t cut it. Photo by Delmaine Donson/iStock

Should You Discuss Race in Your College Essay?

“Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts

“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. …Universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”—Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts

Confused? So are many in higher education. When the United States Supreme Court sacked affirmative action racial preferences in June, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion, while spotlighting applicants’ personal essays, also put vague guardrails around their use. And anyway, not every young person who has suffered racial discrimination wants to revisit it in their essay, that critical part of applying to college where students tell their story in their voice. 

After the SCOTUS decision, the advice from Boston University admissions and college guidance experts is this: your story must always be authentic. It can be about discrimination or other challenges met and dealt with, but it need not be. And it shouldn’t be , if writing about it means revisiting traumatic experiences.

“The essay for us is just going to continue to be as important as it always was,” notwithstanding the new legal landscape, says Kelly Walter (Wheelock’81), BU dean of admissions and associate vice president for enrollment. She has discussed the ruling with the University’s legal office, she says, and her office has tweaked BU’s two essay question options applicants must choose from. (The University also asks potential future Terriers to complete the Common Application for college, which has its own essay requirement.) The tweaks were partly in response to the court ruling, Walter says, but also to ensure that the questions conveyed to students “what BU stood for, and that we value diversity. We thought it was very important to put that out there front and center, and for them to be able to specifically respond to our commitment, our values, as it relates to one of these two essay questions.” 

Those questions are:

Reflect on a social or community issue that deeply resonates with you. Why is it important to you, and how have you been involved in addressing or raising awareness about it? What about being a student at BU most excites you? How do you hope to contribute to our campus community?

While the chief justice exhorted students to share discrimination episodes in answering such questions, recent alum and current student Erika Decklar (Sargent’22, SPH’24) says that may not be comfortable for some. She is an advisor with BU Admissions College Advising Corps (CAC-BU) , which gives college application counseling to low-income and other marginalized high schoolers.

“In my experience,” Decklar says, “students from marginalized backgrounds gravitate towards writing college essays on traumatic experiences, whether they are comfortable sharing these experiences with admissions counselors or not. We have always advised and encouraged students to write about a topic that highlights their strengths, personalities, and passions—whether it is a ‘resiliency’ essay or an essay about their culture, values, or a unique passion.”

After the SCOTUS ruling, Decklar says, her advice to students has not changed. “We should continue motivating students to write about a passion, something that makes them unique, but not coach them to write about their traumatic experiences.” 

Katie Hill, who directs CAC-BU, says applicants sharing in their essays what makes them special “does not require them revisiting their pain. If students so choose, we can help them write about their families and cultures, what is beautiful and makes them proud to be” of that culture.

Students from marginalized backgrounds gravitate towards writing college essays on traumatic experiences, whether they are comfortable sharing these experiences with admissions counselors or not. Erika Deklar (Sargent’22, SPH’24)

But what BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) students do not need, Hill says, is to hear from their advisors that in order to get into college, they need to open themselves up beyond their comfortable boundaries.

Walter agrees that an applicant’s story need not be an unrelenting nightmare. It’s true that some of them “are sharing things about their personal lives that I’m not sure I would have seen 20 years ago,” she says. “Students are certainly talking about their sexual identity in their essays. And some will say to us, ‘I’m telling you this [about my identity], and my parents don’t know yet.’” 

But she can reel off the opening lines from three of her favorite essays over the years that were hardly gloomy. One began, Geeks come in many varieties. “We laughed. It makes you want to keep reading,” she says. Then there was the woman who started, Life is short, and so am I.  

The third: By day, Louis is my trusty companion; by night, my partner in crime. “Doesn’t that make you want to read more and find out who or what Louis is?” Walter asks. (He was the applicant’s first car, a metaphor for this woman’s passion for the independence it conveyed, preparing her for the next step of going to BU, where she indeed matriculated.)

The essay is so important because it’s a given that applicants to BU can manage the academics here. “We have 80,000 students applying for admission to Boston University [annually],” Walter says, “and I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of them can do the work academically. We’re also shaping and building a class.

“For some, it may be leadership. For some, it may be their cultural background. For others, it might be writing for the Daily Free Press. We really want to think about a wide variety of students in our first-year class.” The essay fills in blanks about applicants for admission, along with teacher and counselor recommendations, their high school activities, and their internships or jobs. 

That’s not to say there aren’t lethal don’ts to avoid, most of them emphasizing the necessity of having a proofreader.

“We often get references to ‘Boston College,’” says Patrice Oppliger , a College of Communication assistant professor of communication, who solicits faculty reviews of applicants to COM’s mass communication, advertising, and public relations master’s program before making a decision.

And need we say, do your own work? Walter recalls an essay from a couple of years back where the applicant discussed life in Warren Towers. “And I was like, wait, you couldn’t have lived in Warren Towers, you’re not here yet. And it became very clear that the parent, who was an alum—I think in an effort to help—was telling her story. And somehow no one [in that family] caught that.”

So writing about dealing with discrimination, race-based or otherwise, is fine if it’s not traumatic for you to revisit— and if it’s authentic. Authenticity also includes avoiding over-reliance on artificial intelligence in crafting your essay. According to Admissions’ AI statement ,

If you opt to use these tools at any point while writing your essays, they should only be used to support your original ideas rather than to write your essays in their entirety. As potential future Terriers, we expect all applicants to adhere to the same standards of academic honesty and integrity as our current students. When representing the words or ideas of another in their original work, students should properly credit the source.

“We want to think about not just who will thrive academically at BU,” Walter says, “but also who will enrich the University community and make diverse contributions.”

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Tips for the Lehigh Essay on Anti-Racism

Written by Sara Calvert-Kubrom on October 20th, 2020

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• Tell us how you have taken steps to educate others and/or yourself on anti-racism?
• What’s one way you think your life would have been different had you been born another race?
• What would you want to be different in your own country or community to respond to issues of inequality, inequity, or injustice?

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Racism in schools – Admission Essay

Is racism is schools self perpetuating? In my essay, I run through my thoughts on racism on school and how it may be perpetuating itself. It is my opinion that there is a culture within the school and community that makes racism both inevitable and ongoing.

There is a culture of ignorance and the appreciation of idiocy that seems to inflict a lot of people that may be classed as a minority. The hatred of white people seems to perpetuate ignorance and idiocy, which then leads to yet more racism.

A black person that wants to study may be called white. Another black person may ask, “Why are you being so white?” when found to be studying. If racism didn’t exist, then this sort of comment would have no effect. Sadly, a lot of black people are racist against white people and so feel insulted when they are told they are acting white.

On the other hand, a person that has just come from Africa, and is black, will happily spend all day in a library and school in order to get a good education. They are not so racist. Even if African people were racist against white people, they see that being called white is not as bad as the consequences of not having an education. Coming from a country as poor as Africa, an African person knows that a poor education will mean poverty in the near future and maybe in the long-term future.

People that do not get an education tend to live their lives in ignorance and on welfare. This then makes white people racists against black people as they see a lot of them on welfare and not contributing to society. Such ignorance and idiocy in the black community will also lead to more black people committing crime, which may explain why most prisons are predominantly full of black people.

The racist culture does not only affect people’s educations, it also spills over into college life. People with racist parents may take on their parents’ personas and may act rudely or aggressively towards people of another race. This tension then makes more people racists as they experience racism first hand. In their mind, such ignorance, malice and hatred is uncalled for and that is used as a reason to hate the race of the person doing the hating. It is a big negative circle that spins onwards and perpetuates racism in schools.

Racism is self perpetuating. If black people were not so insulted by being called white, then they study more and get better jobs to help cast off the stereotypical view that black people are lazy scroungers. People that are already racist are helping to perpetuate racism by their actions. The people that racists target are making their victims racist against the race of the attacker. This is yet another cycle of racism that perpetuates itself. In college I will not be surprised if I see quite a bit of racism–though I do expect there to be less in college than in the real world where ignorant people are more commonplace.

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Essay #1. Racism Aches In Me Deeply

My soul is tired, and my eyes run like a river. Violence and hatred uncontrollably spin this country. Its shear force throws this society so far off course that we will never again be centered enough to love, live and let live. I ache deeply, like a hopeless romantic watching a sad movie. But this isn’t a movie. It’s living color, on a stage that has become black and white. As a youngster growing up in Vallejo, California, my Mama taught me to treat everyone the same. She often reminded me that good and bad came in all shapes, sizes and colors. As an adult I’ve tried living my life as a beacon of racial peace and harmony. However, I’m not a wealthy star athlete, famous rapper or an actor. No one cares what I think. Still, I’m compelled to pass on a piece of knowledge.

If this country treated everyone with respect, there would be no need for “Black Lives Matter”. And even if one person doesn’t deserve respect, don’t lay that person’s ignorance on a whole race, culture or group of people. “Black Lives Matter” is important because right now in this country Black people are being killed. For Black People this is real, and it breaks our hearts. Therefore, we must scream “Black Lives Matter”. Black people can be killed so freely, that an internalized inferiority complex has become prevalent in the subconscious of many Black people, especially young Black men. However, every time we try to bring this serious situation to the forefront of society, people want to water it down by coming up with things like, “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter”. Only a heartless individual would not understand that all and blue lives matter. However, “Black Lives Matter” is a cry for inclusion within the belief that “All Lives Matter”. Stop killing Black people as if we don’t matter. Stop mistreating Black people as if we don’t matter. If this country can’t see and be honest about its racism and hatred problem, then we have no choice but to believe that racism and hatred are being perpetrated and ignored on purpose.

One day I had lunch with Shannon Work, a friend I’ve known since college, who happens to be Native Indian. He’s a lawyer who has argued in front of the United States Supreme Court (I was so proud of him.). He explained to me the Native perspective regarding respecting Mother Earth. I totally agreed with what he was saying. But my experience has been, if man can’t respect his fellow man, he ain’t gonna give a damn about the ozone layer, trees, recycling or anything else, that is good for our environment. I told him, I’ll start worrying about recycling, when I have don’t have to worry about my Black teenaged sons being shot over a broken taillight. I’ll be concerned about global warming when White people can no longer call the police and have them harass me, just because I’m sitting in a park, minding my own business.

Throughout history Black people have had to desperately scream, “Black Lives Matter”. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. The truth of the matter is Negroes had to scream “Black Lives Matter” even back when The Constitution was written, in order to have a special amendment added, because those great words of The Constitution didn’t include the Negro. In fact, many of the men who wrote those great words went back to their plantations and the slaves they owned. Today, just by virtue of being an American, Black people shouldn’t ever have to scream “Black Lives Matter”. But the power of racism, dictates that Black people better scream as loud as possible, “Black Lives Matter”.

Racism’s system of power is so well imbedded in our society, Black folk throughout history have always had to scream and fight against it. Nevertheless, there is one element of racism that is vital to its existence. When people aren’t educated, they can be subjected to any treatment a racist system decides to dish out. I use the word ‘decides’, because racism is never an accident. It is done on purpose and therefore it must be un-done on purpose. To rid this country of racism it will take more than people feeling sad towards horrible, racist acts. It will take direct and deliberate actions and move from non-racist to anti-racist. This country will have to deal with racism in a very deliberate way, because this country’s apathy and systematic killing of young Black folks’ minds, via an educational system that is full of White teachers who have little to no training in the area of racism; continues to kill as many young Blacks as the guns of policemen and racists. This is disheartening. And with all my heart, I wish my words mattered. So, I often wonder, where are our Black heroes? Hell, I’ll even take some White heroes. Where are those anti-racist people who really want to make society a better place? I work, helping low income students and students of all colors, get into college. I was put on this planet to enrich, not get rich. Who knows, maybe one of them will be the next Dr. King or Cesar Chavez.

As I peer out into America’s society, I am confused, much like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Are we real or are we merely shadows of what man is supposed to be? But I am brought back from the shadows, to reality, by the trails of blood and bodies. And yes, having to work so hard to navigate my way through the shadows of racism oftentimes makes me feel like giving up. But the memory of those before me, who fought so hard and died so senselessly, in hopes of creating a day when the land of milk and honey would flow to each man or woman based on the mere fact they are human, prevents me from giving up. So, the piece of knowledge I share with you is, please do not try to make sense of society’s hatred. Don’t waste time peering into hatred’s cave trying to discern if racism is real. Rather, in your own personal society, make definite plans to curtail the hatred perpetrated by racism. And just maybe, before the stage dims, we might begin to feel what being human is truly about. And let’s hope, that if we work hard enough, we won’t need to cry “Black Lives Matter”. But until then, we understand that “Black Lives Matter” at its core, is a serious desire for equal inclusion into the United States of America family.

From Racist to Non-Racist to Anti-Racist: Becoming a Part of the Solution Copyright © 2001, 2020 by Keith L. Anderson, PhD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Racism - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

It is difficult to imagine a more painful topic than racism. Violation of civil rights based on race, racial injustice, and discrimination against African American people are just a small part of issues related to racial inequality in the United States. Such a topical issue was also displayed in the context of school and college education, as students are often asked to write informative and research essays about racial discrimination.

The work on this paper is highly challenging as a student is supposed to study various cruel examples of bad attitudes and consider social questions. One should develop a topic sentence alongside the titles, outline, conclusion for essay on racism. The easiest way is to consult racism essay topics and ideas on our web. Also, we provide an example of a free college essay on racism in America for you to get acquainted with the problem.

Moreover, a hint to writing an excellent essay is good hooks considering the problem. You can find ideas for the thesis statement about racism that may help broaden your comprehension of the theme. It’s crucial to study persuasive and argumentative essay examples about racism in society, as it may help you to compose your paper.

Racism is closer than we think. Unfortunately, this awful social disease is also common for all levels and systems in the US. A student can develop a research paper about systemic racism with the help of the prompts we provide in this section.

Racism in Pop Culture

Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, both names are familiar and quite popular in Hollywood and on television. An emerging actor John Boyega whose name may not be widely known nevertheless impressed the audience with his character Finn from Star Wars. But as popular as these movie actors are, the movie that they all starred in The Circle did not sit well with the audience. In addition to the movie's low rating on film review sites and its abrupt ending that left […]

Appeal to Ethos, Logos and Pathos Racism

Abraham Lincoln once said, Achievement has no color."", but is that really true? In many cases of racism, people have been suppressed and kept from being able to contribute to the society. Racism is a blight and a hindrance to our development. Imagine the many things we could do if people could set aside differences and cooperate meaningfully. Sadly that is not the case. In reality, people are put down because of their heritage and genetics. By no means is […]

Professions for Women by Virginia Woolf

Have you ever asked yourself why people assume something of others by looks? In the chapter, Professions for Women written in 1931 by Virginia Woolf, who talks about her life and the difference she tried to make for all women in that period. She wanted her audience who were professional women to be able to figure out on their own what her story was about. Woolf talks about how she was unmasked and confused as she makes her readers understand […]

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Racism in Movie “42”

The movie I chose for this assignment is 42 starring Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford. The movie is about Jackie Robinson, a baseball player who broke the color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. One of the topics we covered in this course was racism. For my generation it is hard to understand how pervasive racism used to be in society. I have three cousins that have a black father. Many of my friends are from different races and […]

Racism and the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Introduction The primary purpose of this report is to explore racism issues in the United States justice system and addressing the solutions to the problem affecting the judicial society. Racism entails social practices that give merits explicitly solely to members of certain racial groups. Racism is attributed to three main aspects such as; personal predisposition, ideologies, and cultural racism, which promotes policies and practices that deepen racial discrimination. Institutional racism is also rife in the US justice system. This entails […]

About Black Lives Matter Movement

The fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution are inherent for all. There is no question that all people (blacks, Latinos, Indians, or white) were created free and equal with certain inalienable rights. This is a universally accepted principle. Segregation and racism against minorities in this country have been widely discussed, and prominent figures have taken a stand asking people to join in the fight for equality. This stand addresses the significance of black lives. However, contrasting opinions on […]

Structural Racism in U.S. Medical Care System Doctor-Patient Relationship

US history is littered with instances of racism and it has creeped into not only social, political, and economic structures of society, but also the US healthcare system. Racism is the belief that one race is superior over others, which leads to discrimination and prejudice against people based on their race or ethnicity (Romano). Centuries of racism in the United States' social structures has led to institutionalized or systemic racism”policies and behaviors adapted into our social, economic, and political systems […]

Slavery and Racism in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is absolutely relating a message to readers about the ills of slavery but this is a complex matter. On the one hand, the only truly good and reliable character is Jim who, a slave, is subhuman. Also, twain wrote this book after slavery had been abolished, therefore, the fact that is significant. There are still several traces of some degree of racism in the novel, including the use of the n word and his tendency […]

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest James Gaines

The author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines, is a male African American author who has taken full advantage of his culture by writing about rural Louisiana. His stories mainly tell the struggles of blacks trying to make a living in racist and discriminating lands. Many of his stories are based on his own family experiences. In Ernest J. Gaines’ novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, four themes that are displayed are the nature of […]

History of Racism

Racism started in the 1700s and has still been occuring till this day. From the looks of it, it seems to be that racism would never end. Because of cultural reasons, stereotypes, and economic reasons, it will always be an issue. People teach their kids to be racist, and make racists comments like it's normal. We can't stop people from having their personal opinions on racism, but we can stay aware of how racists others could be, our history of […]

A Simple Introduction to Three Main Types of Racism

Race plays an important role in both personal and social life, and racial issues are some of the most heated debates in the world due to their complexity, involving the diverse historical and cultural backgrounds of different ethnic groups. Consciously or unconsciously, when one race holds prejudice, discrimination, and a sense of superiority to oppress another race, the issue of racism arises. Based on aspects of individual biases, social institutions, and cultural backgrounds, the three most common types of racism […]

Civil Rights Martyrs

Are you willing to give your life for your people? These martyrs of the civil rights movement gave everything for their people. Although some may say their deaths did not have an impact on the civil rights movements. They risked their lives just so African Americans could have the rights they have today. The definition of martyr is a person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs. They believe that everyone should be equal and have the […]

Making Racism Obsolete

Does racism still exist? Some would say no?, but some would agree that racism is a cut that won't heal. Molefi Kete Asante is a professor at Temple University and has written many books during his career. In this analysis I will dissect Asante's work covering racism from the past, present and the future moving forward. Asante argues that America is divided between two divisions, the Promise and the Wilderness. Historically, African Americans has been at a disadvantage politically, socially, […]

American Rule in the Philippines and Racism

During our almost 50 years of control in the Philippines, many of our law makers and leaders were fueled by debates at home, and also our presence overseas. These two perspectives gave a lot of controversy as to how Americans were taking control, and confusion of what they were actually doing in the Philippines. Many leaders drew from Anglo- Saxon beliefs, which lead to racist ideas and laws. These combined proved unfair treatment of the Filipinos and large amounts of […]

Social Media’s Role in Perceptions of Racism in the USA

Research studies show that racism has been in existence for centuries. Whether this is still an issue, is the question we must ask ourselves. The internet or, social media has become a major part of society over the years and conveys information, news, opinionated posts, and propaganda, as well. There are several factors involved within this topic and a plethora of resources available in search of the answers. We will look at different opinions, research studies, and ideas in relation […]

The Institutional Racism

In today society there is several police brutality against black people, and it is governed by the behavioral norms which defined the social and political institution that support institutional systems. Black people still experience racism from people who think they are superior, it is a major problem in our society which emerged from history till date and it has influences other people mindset towards each other to live their dreams. In the educational system, staffs face several challenges among black […]

Movie Review of Argo with Regards to Geography

The movie "Crash" is set in a geographical setting which clearly helps in building the major themes of racial discrimination and drug trafficking. This is because the movie is set in Los Angeles which is an area of racial discrimination epitome and partially in Mexico, a geographical area well known for drug trafficking (Schneider, 2014). The physical geographical setting where the movie is shot is very crucial as it helps in developing the main themes of the movie. The movie […]

The Development of Cultural Racism Associated with American Politics

Abstract Politics in the United States have always been a heated issue, and never more so than now. The surprising election of Donald Trump has created a clear cultural divide on many levels that continues to cultivate hate, and gifts not just Americans but the entire world with cultural racism that we have not seen for a long time. The political divide in America affects every American, every day, so much so that you would be hard-pressed to find someone […]

Racism and Civil War

One person is all it takes to change the world, for the good or for the bad. In this democratic society, every person is granted the same three unalienable rights: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the Declaration of Independence stands true, then what’s the difference between a white individual and a black individual? The word “racism” is associated with the idea of one race being superior to the other, most commonly, blacks are “inferior” to whites. No […]

What is Racism?

Racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior and the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or […]

There Will Always be Color Racism is not Dead

Racism is not dead. Equality does not exist. The color of a person's skin still matters. Even in the 21st century, there are flaws within our legal system that has allowed Jim Crow to still exist under a new skin. The United States has used mass incarceration to continually disenfranchise millions of the African American Community. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander reasons that the criminal justice system is faulty and with […]

Discrimination of Races

Discrimination of races is something that is occuring in our society everyday. It still exists today because it started so long ago and once certain races had the hierarchy, some refuse to let go of the idea that they have more power just because they look a certain way and they choose to discriminate the minorities. Discrimination against a person's race occurs when an individual or group of individuals are treated unequally because of their true or perceived race. I […]

Racism and Discrimination: the Influence of Past Sins

Discrimination against black people by white people in the United States had been regarded as a matter of course and justifiable for more than 300 years. Therefore, the problem is far more than whether the laws are prohibited or not, but whether people's mind and concepts are changed or not. The latter is something that everyone understands but is the most difficult to do. While looking at American history, the history of African Americans can be said to be soaked […]

Racism: Unmasking Microaggressions and Discrimination

Reading through the article provided a vivid reflection on how racism becomes a serious issue in the today society. There are various types of racism the article brings out manifested in micro aggression form. The varied opinions in my mind provide a clear picture of the information relayed in the article through the following analysis. Discrimination concerning race will major in my analysis. First, let me talk about the black guy abused in the Saudi Arabia that has sparked public […]

Color Blind Racism

I enjoyed watching this documentary “White Like Me”, by Tim Wise. What I found most surprising was the fact that Tim Wise was a white male and was the individual in the film talking about the discrimination people of color receive. There were a few other things that surprised me, like the fact that there are more African Americans in jail and on probation than the number of those enslaved in 1850. The movie version of Black Like Me was […]

The Acts of Imperialism and Racism in “The Heart of Darkness”

In the novel The Heart of Darkness, the reader is introduced to the acts of imperialism and racism. The story tells of Europeans who have established a colony in Africa that is being used for trade purposes. However, the background of the story is that the Europeans are trying to colonize the Africans and introduce them to the European way of living. The white traders are not only trying to change the Africans way of life, the whites also view […]

Stereotyping and Discrimination

Introduction The movie starts with all the animals living together and happily in the big city. Their peaceful lives are then disturbed by ferocious predators. The case goes to the swindler fox and a bunny cop, those who unintentionally solve many problems related to hidden cases of interspecies.Rhetorical Strategies Few of the negative observers interpret that movie does not openly or directly express the racism. Additionally, the writer named as Nico Lang also asserts that movie does not score much […]

Police Brutality and Racism

The Declaration of Independence was created to protect the inalienable rights that all Americans receive at birth, yet police brutality continues to threaten the rights of African Americans everywhere. Police everywhere need to be given mandatory psychological tests in order to gain awareness of racial bias in law enforcement and allow citizens to slowly gain trust for the officers in law enforcement. No one wants a child to grow up in a world filled with hate. As Martin Luther King […]

Effects of Racism in Desiree’s Baby

As hard as it may be to talk about it, race has found a humble abode in literature. Desiree’s baby revolves around race and how it affects its main characters. A woman by the name of Desiree gives birth to a baby boy who is fathered by cruel slave master Armand Aubigny. Desiree makes a startling discovery when she finds out that her baby is of African heritage and this infuriates her husband who kicks them out causing Desiree to […]

Racism and Slavery

During the colonial period, Americans came up with the idea to bring African men and women overseas and use them as slaves. The effects of slavery on African Americans were enormous, and the white men got higher ranked in the hierarchy than the back men because of the colour of their skin. In order to discuss the impact that slavery has had on today’s society, you need to first address why it actually occurred. During the 17th and 18th century, […]

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How To Write An Essay On Racism

Introduction to the complexities of racism.

Writing an essay on racism involves delving into a complex and sensitive subject that has deep historical roots and contemporary implications. Begin your essay by defining racism as a system of discrimination based on race, affecting individuals and groups socially, economically, and politically. Highlight the importance of understanding racism not only as overt acts of discrimination but also as institutional and systemic practices. This introduction should lay the groundwork for your exploration, whether it's focused on historical aspects of racism, its manifestations in modern society, or strategies for combating racial prejudice and inequality.

Historical Context and Evolution of Racism

The body of your essay should include a detailed examination of the historical context and evolution of racism. Discuss how racism has been perpetuated and institutionalized over time, highlighting key historical events and policies that have contributed to racial discrimination and segregation. Depending on your essay’s focus, you might explore the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, Jim Crow laws, or apartheid, among other topics. This historical perspective is crucial for understanding how past injustices continue to shape present racial dynamics and attitudes.

Analyzing Modern Manifestations of Racism

Transition to discussing the modern manifestations of racism. Examine how racism operates in current societal structures, such as in the criminal justice system, education, employment, and healthcare. Discuss the concept of systemic racism and how it perpetuates inequality, as well as the impact of racial bias and stereotypes in media representation and everyday interactions. This section should also address the intersectionality of racism, acknowledging how race intersects with other identities like gender, class, and sexuality, contributing to unique experiences of discrimination.

Strategies for Addressing and Combating Racism

Conclude your essay by exploring strategies for addressing and combating racism. Discuss the importance of education, awareness-raising, and open dialogue in challenging racist beliefs and stereotypes. Reflect on the role of policy changes, affirmative action, and reparations in addressing systemic racism. Emphasize the importance of individual and collective action in fostering a more inclusive and equitable society. Your conclusion should not only summarize the key points of your essay but also inspire a sense of hope and commitment to anti-racist efforts, underscoring the ongoing work needed to dismantle racism in all its forms.

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398 Racism Essay Titles & Writing Examples

• 🔖 Secrets of Powerful Racism Essay

🏆 Best Racism Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

🥇 most interesting racism topics to write about, 🎓 simple & easy racism essay titles, ⚡ shocking essay topics on racism, 👍 good essay topics on racism, 💡 interesting essay titles about racism, ❓ racism questions for essay.

Looking for powerful racism essay topics? You will find them here! This list contains a great variety of titles for racism-themed papers. We’ve also included useful tips and plenty of racism essay examples to help you write an outstanding paper.

🔖 Secrets of a Powerful Racism Essay

Writing an essay on racism may seem easy at first. However, because racism is such a popular subject in social sciences, politics, and history, your piece needs to be truly powerful to receive a high mark. Here are the best tips to help make your racism essay stand out:

• Consider the historical causes of racism. Papers on racism often focus on discrimination and equality in modern society. Digging a bit deeper and highlighting the origins of racism will make your essay more impressive. Check academic resources on the subject to see how racism was connected to the slave trade, politics, and social development in Europe. Explore these ideas in your paper to make it more compelling!
• Show critical thinking. Racism essay titles often focus on the effects of racism on the population. To make your essay more powerful, you will need to discuss the things that are often left out. Think about why racial discrimination is still prevalent in modern society and who benefits from racist policies. This will show your tutor that you understand the topic in great depth.
• Look for examples of racism in art. One of the reasons as to why racism spread so quickly is because artists and authors supported the narratives of race. If you explore paintings by European artists created in 17-18 centuries, you will find that they often highlighted the differences between black and white people to make the former seem less human. In various literary works, such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Shakespeare’s Othello, racism plays a vital role. In contrast, more recent works of art consider racism from a critical viewpoint. Examining how racism is reflected in the art will help you to earn an excellent mark for your analysis of the subject.
• Discuss the influences of racism. Of course, one of the key racism essay topics is the impact of racism on black populations in various countries. It is true that discrimination plays an essential role in the lives of black people, and reflecting this in your paper will help you to make it influential. You can discuss various themes here, from police brutality to healthcare access. Support your claims with high-quality data from official sources. If appropriate, you can also show how racism affected your life or the lives of your friends and loved ones.
• Show the correlation between racism and other social issues. Racism is connected to many different types of discrimination, including sexism and homophobia. This allows you to expand your paper by showing these links and explaining them. For instance, you could write an essay on racism and xenophobia, or find other topics that interest you.

Finally, structure your essay well. Write an outline first to determine the sequence of key points. You can check out a racism essay example on this website to see how other people structure their work.

Racism Thesis Statement, Main Body, & Conclusion

A typical essay should have an introduction, the main body, and a conclusion. Each paragraph of the main body should start with a topic sentence. Here’s what a topic sentence for racism-themed essay can look like:

Racism continues to be a pervasive issue in society, with deep-rooted prejudices and discrimination that impact individuals and communities across the globe.

Don’t forget to include a racism essay thesis statement at the end of your introduction to identify the focus of the paper! Check out these racism thesis statements for inspiration:

Racism is pervasive social problem that manifests in various forms, perpetuating systemic inequalities and marginalizing minority groups. Through an examination of racism’s history and its psychological impact on individuals, it becomes evident that this pressing issue demands collective action for meaningful change.

In your essay’s conclusion, you can simply paraphrase the thesis and add a couple of additional remarks.

These guidelines will help you to ensure that your work is truly outstanding and deserving of a great mark! Be sure to visit our website for more racism example essays, topics, and other useful materials.

These points will help you to ensure that your work on racism is truly influential and receives a great mark! Be sure to visit our website for example papers, essay titles, and other useful materials.

• The Challenges of Racism Influential for the Life of Frederick Douglass and Barack Obama However, Douglass became an influential anti-slavery and human rights activist because in the early childhood he learnt the power of education to fight inequality with the help of his literary and public speaking skills to […]
• Racism in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain The character of Pap is used to advance the theme of racism in the book. In the closing chapters of the book, Huck and Tom come to the realization that Jim is not property but […]
• Racism in Music: “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” The extreme popularity of the song among the black population can be explained with references to the fact that Armstrong changed the original lyrics to accentuate the social meaning of the composition and elaborated the […]
• Racism in “The Black Table Is Still There” by Graham The black table, as he calls it, is a table, that was and still is, present in his school’s cafeteria, that accommodated the black students only depicting no more than racism in schools.
• Racism in the “Dutchman” by Amiri Baraka Generally, one is to keep in mind that Baraka is recognized to be one of the most important representatives of the black community, and the theme of racism in The Dutchman has, therefore, some historical […]
• Racism and Discrimination as Social Constructs This is because the concept of race has a negative connotation in the society. For example in some societies, especially the western society; the concept of race implies un-fair treatment and discrimination of a particular […]
• Maya Angelou: Racism and Segregation in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” An example is that, as she fails to recite her poem in church, she notes that her dress is probably a handout from a white woman.
• Racism and Motherhood Themes in Grimke’s “Rachel” In addition, her mother kept the cause of the deaths of Rachel’s father and brother secret. In essence, the play Rachel is educative and addresses some of the challenges people face in society.
• Racial Discrimination in “A Raisin in the Sun” Racial discrimination is the main theme of the book, strongly reflecting the situation that prevailed during the 1950s in the United States, a time when the story’s Younger family lived in Chicago’s South Side ghetto.
• Contrast Between Tituba and John Indian and Countering Racism The declaration suggests that Conde believed the story of Tituba’s maltreatment needed to be told to expose the truth she had been denied due to her skin color and gender.
• Cause and Effect of Racial Discrimination Irrespective of massive efforts to emphasize the role of diversity and equality in society, it is still impossible to state that the United States is free from racial discrimination.
• Imperialism and Racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness He lauds “the book’s anti-imperialist theme…a stinging indictment of the callous and genocidal treatment of the Africans, and other nationals, at the hands of the British and the European imperial powers,” and also details the […]
• The Anatomy of Scientific Racism: Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement Miller is of the view that it is the white scholars that are responsible for impeding the success of black athletes and performers.
• Racial Discrimination Effects in Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody The vivid description of events from the beginning gives the reader a clear picture of a girl who was born in problems and in spite of her intelligence she always became a victim of circumstances.
• Racism in Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The formalist analysis of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep repeats the same mistake, as it focuses on the plot devices and tropes presented in the story.
• Racism and Gender in Beyoncé’s Lemonade The album Lemonade by an American singer Beyonce is one of the brightest examples when an artist portrays the elements of her culture in her music. Along with music videos, the album features a number […]
• Racism in “Passing” and “Uncle Tom’s Children” Novels Therefore, the evolution of the society gave rise to the reconsideration of the approach to racism and promoted the increase of the level of consciousness of the discriminated people.
• Black or White Racism When one listens to the “Black or White” song, it is clear that Michael Jackson is not expecting his audience to be either white or black people to listen and learn the message he is […]
• Colonialism and Racism in Foe by J. M. Coetzee and Small Island by Andrea Levy This paper will try to expound on the relevance of real-life politics, of colonialism and racism, with regards to two popular works of fiction that used as themes or backdrop colonialism and racism.
• Sexism, Racism, Ableism, Ageism, Classism The absurdity and blatant sexism of this issue made me angry at how the United States is unable to resolve and overcome the lack of gender equality.
• Racial Discrimination Through the Cosmetics Industry The variety of preconceptions such as the hypersexuality of black women and the perception of their beauty as an unideal version of whites’ one also indicates racism.
• The Problem of Racism in Brazilian Football Skidmore describes it as the relationships that could result into conflict and consciousness and determination of the people’s status in a community or a particular group. In football, racism damages pride of the players and […]
• Does Racism and Discrimination Still Exist Today? This fact explains why racism and discrimination are inseparable in many parts of the globe. Sex discrimination continues to affect the goals and expectations of many women in our society.
• The Problem of Racism and Injustice in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee In the novel, Harper Lee demonstrates her vision of the question of the social inequality with references to the problem of racism in the society based on prejudice and absence of actual principles of tolerance […]
• Root Causes and Solutions to Racism Media is meant to eradicate racism and maintain unity among people but the case is different in some situations. Also, it is vital to make children understand nothing is amusing in the use of stereotypes […]
• Racism Effects on the Premier League Players This work aims to provide a full picture of the real issue, and it is fundamental to understand the essence of the problem through the investigation of the players’ personal opinions and their experiences.
• How Racism Makes Us Sick: Public Talk That Matters As a developing learner, I find this speech as a good example of how to raise such provocative themes as racism in the United States and not to be obsessed with prejudice.
• Racism in Play “Othello” by William Shakespeare Since Othello is dark-skinned, the society is against his marriage to the daughter of the senator of Venice. In summary, the play Othello is captivating and presents racism as it was.
• Colin Powell and the Fight Against Structural Racism When donating his uniform to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Powell stated that the museum is a “treasure” the significance of which extends borders of the country.
• Racism: De Brahm’s Map and the Casta Paintings However, De Brahm’s map is one of the most striking pieces of evidence of the conquest of space and the entrenchment of the idea of land and people as titular property.
• Racism and Inequality in Society The idea of race as a social construct is examined in the first episode of the documentary series “The Power of an Illusion”.
• Anti-Racism: Marginalization and Exclusion in Healthcare This essay examines the course’s impact and the concepts of marginalization and exclusion in healthcare. Marginalization is a concept that has profoundly influenced the understanding of race and racism in healthcare.
• The Issue of Racism in the United States The entire history of the United States is permeated with the evolution of the ideas of racism. Turning to history, we can see that the U.S.moved from slavery to using the Black population to solve […]
• History of Racial Discrimination in Haiti and America The choice of topic, racial discrimination in Haiti and America, was influenced by beliefs, values, and assumptions emphasizing the importance of equality and justice for all races.
• Racism and History of Discrimination As a result, advocacy should be aimed at creating new models in criminal justice that will ensure the protection of all minority groups and due process.
• Racial Discrimination and Color Blindness Of the three ideologies, racial harmony is considered the most appropriate for coping with problems of racism and racial injustice due to various reasons.
• Race, Racism, and Dangers of Race Thinking While it is true that some forms of race thinking can be used to justify and perpetuate racism, it is not necessarily the case that all forms of race thinking are inherently racist. Race thinking […]
• Racial Discrimination in American Literature In this way, the author denies the difference between people of color and whites and, therefore, the concept of racism in general.
• Racism in the US: Settler Imperialism They prove that colonial imperialism is a structure, not a contextual phenomenon and that, as such, it propagates the marginalization of native people.
• Why Empathy in Racism Should Be Avoided Empathy is the capacity to comprehend and experience the emotions and ideas of others. Moreover, empathic emotions are essential to social and interpersonal life since they allow individuals to adapt their cognitive processes to their […]
• Racial Discrimination in High Education This peer-reviewed scholar article was found in the JSTOR database through entering key words “race affirmative action” and marking the publication period between 2017 and 2022.
• Social Sciences: Racism Through Different Lenses A thorough analysis of diversity adds value to social interactions by informing human behavior through a deeper understanding of racism and its impacts on society. Using the humanities lens leads to a better understanding of […]
• Racial Discrimination in Dormitory Discrimination is considered to be behavior that restricts the rights and freedoms of the individual. Therefore, it is essential to investigate discrimination in dormitories and propose solutions to this problem, such as disseminating knowledge about […]
• Racism and Its Impact on Populations and Society The ignorance of many individuals about other people’s cultures and ethnicities is one of the causes of racism. One can examine the various components of society and how they relate to the issue of racism […]
• Institutionalized Racism and Individualistic Racism Excellent examples of individualistic racism include the belief in white supremacy, racial jokes, employment discrimination, and personal prejudices against black people. Overall, institutionalized and individualistic racism is a perversive issue that affects racial relations in […]
• Community Engagement with Racism To enhance the population’s degree of involvement in racism, the study calls for collaboration; this can be seen as a community effort to foster a sense of teamwork.
• Racism Detection with Implicit Association Test Racial bias is deeply rooted in human society and propelled by norms and stereotypic ideologies that lead to implicit bias and the unfair treatment of minority groups.
• Identity and Belonging: Racism and Ethnicity In the documentary Afro Germany – Being Black and German, several individuals share their stories of feeling mistreated and excluded because of their skin color.
• Policies to Eliminate Racial Disparities and Discrimination The solution to exclusion is to build social inclusion in the classroom and within the school by encouraging peer acceptance, cross-group friendships, and built-in prevention.
• Causes, Facilitators, and Solutions to Racism These theories suggest that racism serves a particular function in society, occurs due to the interactions of individuals from dominant groups, and results from a human culture of prejudice and discrimination.
• Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education An example is the complaint of the parents of one of the black students that, during the passage of civilizations, the Greeks, Romans, and Incas were discussed in the lessons, but nothing was said about […]
• Empathy and Racism in Stockett’s The Help and Li’s To Kill a Mockingbird To start with, the first approach to racism and promoting empathy is to confront prevalent discrimination and racism, which was often shown in The Help. Another solution to racism and the possibility of promoting empathy […]
• Is Troy Maxson (Wilson’s Fences) a Victim of Racism? As a black American, Troy’s childhood experiences have been passed on to his children, making him a victim of an oppressive culture. Therefore, this makes Troy a victim of racism and culture, contributing to his […]
• Racism in the Healthcare Sector In 2020, the cases and instances of racism in healthcare rose by 16% from 2018; there were notable instances of racism in various spheres of health. 9% of blacks have been protected from discrimination and […]
• Racism in Healthcare and Education The mission should emphasize that it promotes diversity and equality of all students and seeks to eliminate racial bias. It is necessary to modify the mission to include the concept of inclusiveness and equality.
• Institutional Racism in the Workplace Despite countless efforts to offer African-Americans the same rights and opportunities as Whites, the situation cannot be resolved due to the emergence of new factors and challenges.
• Racism in Education in the United States Such racial disparities in the educational workforce confirm the problem of structural racism and barrier to implementing diversity in higher medical education. Structural racism has a long history and continues to affect the growth of […]
• Rhetoric in Obama’s 2008 Speech on Racism When the audience became excited, it was Obama’s responsibility to convey his message in a more accessible form. To conclude, Obama’s speech in 2008 facilitated his election as the first African American President in history.
• How to Talk to Children About Racism The text begins by referring to recent events that were related to race-based discrimination and hatred, such as the murder of George Floyd and the protests dedicated to the matter.
• Care for Real: Racism and Food Insecurity Care for Real relies on the generosity of residents, donation campaigns, and business owners to collect and deliver these supplies. The research article discusses some of the factors that contribute to the creation of racism […]
• Racism Towards Just and Holistic Health Therefore, the critical content of the event was to determine the steps covered so far in the fight for racial equality in the provision of care and what can be done to improve the status […]
• Racism and Related Issues in Canadian Society The first issue is that it does not review the systemic and structural aspects of racism and how it affects various institutions and society as a whole.
• Systemic Racism and Discrimination Thus, exploring the concept of race from a sociological perspective emphasizes the initial aspect of inequality in the foundation of the concept and provides valuable insight into the reasons of racial discrimination in modern society.
• The Racism Problem and Its Relevance The images demonstrate how deeply racism is rooted in our society and the role the media plays in spreading and combating racism.
• Aspects of Socio-Economic Sides of Racism And the answer is given in Dorothy Brown’s article for CNN “Whites who escape the attention of the police benefit because of slavery’s long reach”.. This shows that the problem of racism is actual in […]
• Tackling Racism in the Workplace It means that reporting racism to HR does not have the expected positive effect on workplace relations, and employees may not feel secure to notify HR about the incidences of racism.
• Issue of Racism Around the World One of the instances of racism around the world is the manifestations of violence against indigenous women, which threatens the safety of this vulnerable group and should be mitigated.
• The Racism Problem and How to Fight It Racism is one of the common problems of the modern world which might not allow several individuals to feel a valuable part of society due to their skin color, gender, or social status.
• Environmental Racism: The Water Crisis in Flint, Michigan The situation is a manifestation of environmental racism and classism since most of the city’s population is people of color and poor. Thus, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is a manifestation of environmental racism […]
• The “Racism and Discrimination” Documentary The documentary “Racism and Discrimination” is about an anti-racist teacher Jane Elliot who attempts to show the white people the feeling of discrimination. The central argument of the documentary is diversity training to seize the […]
• Abortion-Related Racial Discrimination in the US In spite of being a numerical minority, Black women in the U.S.resort to abortion services rather often compared to the White population.
• Social Problems Surrounding Racism, Prejudice and Discrimination This kind of discrimination makes the students lose their self-esteem and the traumas experienced affects the mental health of these students in the long term.
• Racism and Intolerance: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Crafting a Legacy by Messer elaborates on the legacy of the event and its repercussions and offers a profound analysis of the issue, which strengthened my focus of the research.
• The Unethical Practice of Racism in a Doctor’s Case The involvement of Barrett in the protest is both unethical for the university’s image and immoral for the community. However, the school would likely face tougher court fines and a direct order to reinstate Barrett’s […]
• The Problem of Racism in America One explanation of racism by feminist thinkers is that racism is a manifestation of the agency and power of people of a particular racial identity over others.
• Racism: “The Sum of Us” Article by McGhee The economic analysis and sociological findings in America have drawn a detailed picture of the cost of racism in America and how to overcome it together.
• Contemporary Sociological Theories and American Racism The central intention of this theory paper is to apply modern theoretical concepts from the humanities discipline of sociology to the topic of racism in the United States.
• A Cause-and-Effect Analysis of Racism and Discrimination As a result, it is vital to conduct a cause-and-effect analysis to determine the key immediate and hidden causes of racism to be able to address them in a proper manner.
• Institutional Racism Through the Lenses of Housing Policy While not being allowed to buy property because of the racial covenants, the discriminated people had to house in other areas.
• Role of Racism in Contemporary US Public Opinion This source is useful because it defines racism, describes its forms, and presents the survey results about the prevalence of five types of racial bias.
• The Mutation of Racism into New Subtle Forms The trend reflects the ability of racism to respond to the rising sensitivity of the people and the widespread rejection of prejudice.
• Racism: Healthcare Crisis and the Nurses Role The diminished admittance to mind is because of the impacts of fundamental bigotry, going from doubt of the medical care framework to coordinate racial segregation by medical care suppliers.
• Origins of Racial Discrimination Despite such limitations as statistical data being left out, I will use this article to support the historical evaluation of racism in the United States and add ineffective policing to the origins of racism.
• Beverly Greene Life and View of Racism The plot of the biography, identified and formed by the Ackerman Institute for the Family in the life of the heroine, consists of dynamics, personality development and its patterns.
• Historical Racism in South Africa and the US One of the major differences between the US and South Africa is the fact that in the case of the former, an African American minority was brought to the continent to serve the White majority.
• Capitalism and Racism in Past and Present Racism includes social and economic inequalities due to racial identity and is represented through dispossession, colonialism, and slavery in the past and lynching, criminalization, and incarceration in the present.
• Minstrels’ Influence on the Spread of Racism The negative caricatures and disturbing artifacts developed to portray Black people within the museum were crucial in raising awareness on the existence of racism.
• How Parents of Color Transcend Nightmare of Racism Even after President Abraham Lincoln outlawed enslavement and won the American Civil War in 1965, prejudice toward black people remained engrained in both the northern and southern cultural structures of the United States.
• A Problem of Racial Discrimination in the Modern World This minor case suggests the greater problem that is unjustly treating people in the context of the criminal justice system. In the book, Stevenson writes about groups of people who are vulnerable to being victimized […]
• Beverly Tatum’s Monolog About Injustice of Racism Furthermore, the author’s point is to define the state of discrimination in the country and the world nowadays and explore what steps need to be taken to develop identity.
• Issue of Institutional Racism Systemic and structural racisms are a form of prejudice that is prevalent and deeply ingrained in structures, legislation, documented or unpublished guidelines, and entrenched customs and rituals.
• Racism in America Today: Problems of Today Even though racism and practices of racial discrimination had been banned in the 1960s after the mass protests and the changes to the laws that banned racial discrimination institutionally.
• Evidence of Existence of Modern Racism It would be wrong to claim that currently, the prevalence and extent of manifestations of racism are at the same level as in the middle of the last century.
• Culture Play in Prejudices, Stereotyping, and Racism However, cognitive and social aspects are significant dimensions that determine in-group members and the constituents of a threat in a global religious view hence the relationship between religion and prejudices.
• Latin-African Philosophical Wars on Racism in US Hooker juxtaposition Vasconcelos’ ‘Cosmic Race’ theory to Douglass’s account of ethnicity-based segregation in the U.S.as a way of showing the similarities between the racial versions of the two Americas.
• Confronting Stereotypes, Racism and Microaggression Stereotypes are established thought forms rooted in the minds of particular groups of people, in the social environment, and in the perception of other nations.
• Racial Discrimination in Dallas-Fort Worth Region Thus, there is a historical imbalance in the political representation of racial minorities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Nonetheless, the Black population is reported to thrive best in the suburban areas of DFW, where this […]
• Healthcare Call to Action: Racism in Medicine To start the fight, it is necessary to identify the main manifestations of discrimination in health care, the reasons for the emergence of the location of social superiority and discrimination, and the scale.
• White Counselors Broaching Race and Racism Study The essence of the verbal behavior of the consultants is the ways of their reaction in the process of interaction with the client – the basic skills of counseling, accessibly including race and racism topics.
• British Colonial Racism for Aboriginal Australians Precisely this colonial racism and genocide can be considered to be the cruelest in the history of the world and may have influenced the ideas and plans of Adolf Hitler, who got inspired by the […]
• American Culture and Its Racism Roots However, the discrimination seems not to be justified since many shreds of evidence show that many Americans are thought to be immigrants to the continent, with the first immigrants being the Spanish and the French.
• The Black People: Sexuality and Racial Discrimination Nevertheless, the author does not provide practical solutions to the issue of racism and discrimination of the LGBTQ community. The purpose of this interview is to demonstrate the author’s attitude to the sexuality of black […]
• Racism Evolution: Experience of African Diaspora As a result, distinct foundations fostered the necessity of inequality to establish effectiveness of inferiority and superiority complexes. To determine the effect of slavery and racism to modern society.
• The Problem of Explicit Racism The murder of George Floyd was one example of the police’s brutal racism, and there are many more cases of horrible discrimination that takes people’s lives.
• Racial Discrimination and Residential Segregation Despite the end of segregation policies and the passing of Fair Housing laws and numerous subsidy measures, people of color cannot access wealthy areas, facing unofficial exclusion into poorer parts of the city.
• Significance of Perceived Racism:Ethnic Group Disparities in Health Coates points out that a sign of the gulf between blacks and whites manifests in the context where there is expectation for him to enlighten his opinions while in mind the essential indication lies in […]
• Racism as Origin of Enslavement Some ideas are mentioned in the video, for example, the enslavement of Black people and their children. The most shocking fact mentioned by the speaker of the video is that children of enslaved people were […]
• Colorblind Racism and Its Minimization Colorblind racism is a practice that people use to defend themselves against accusations of racism and deny the significance of the problem.
• Legacy of Racism Against African American Women and Men This was a movie called The Birth of A Nation which supposedly tells ‘the American history.’ The white men who praised the Ku Klux Klan were shown as superior and intelligent.
• The Bill H.R.666 Anti-Racism in Public Health Act of 2021 That is why the given paper will identify a current and health-related bill and comment on it. This information demonstrates that it is not reasonable to oppose passing the bill under consideration.
• Summary of the Issue About Racism In schools in the United States, with the advent of the new president, a critical racial theory began to be taught.
• How the Prison Industrial Complex Perpetuate Racism In the United States, the system is a normalization of various dynamics, such as historical, cultural, and interpersonal, that routinely benefit the whites while causing negative impacts for the people of color.
• Battling Racism in the Modern World Racism and racial discrimination undermine the foundations of the dignity of an individual, as they aim to divide the human family, to which all peoples and people belong, into different categories, marking some of them […]
• Indian Youth Against Racism: Photo Analysis The main cause of racism within American societies is the high superiority complex possessed by the white individuals living with the Asian American in the society.
• Racism: Do We Need More Stringent Laws? The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice is worried that national origin discrimination in the U.S.may go undetected because victims of prejudice are unaware of their legal rights or are hesitant to complain […]
• Problem of Racism in Schools Overview Racism should be discouraged by all means and the government should do its best to educate citizens on the importance of unity and the disadvantages of racism.
• US Immigration Policy and Its Correlation to Structural Racism That may create breaches in the immigration policy and cause social instability that could endanger the status of immigrants and even negatively affect the lives of the nationals.
• America: Racism, Terrorism, and Ethno-Culturalism The myth of the frontier is one of the strongest and long-lived myths of America that animates the imagination of the Americans even to this day.
• Racism in Healthcare and Its Implications Generally, the presence of racism in the medical sphere affects not only the relationship between the a professional and their patient, but also the quality of care people receive and the severity of their outcomes.
• Issue of Racism in Healthcare The theory would question whether racism in healthcare is ethical and whether it facilitates the provision of care in a manner that is centered on values such as compassion, fairness, and integrity.
• Racism and Statistical & Pure Discrimination For employers, the residents of the inner city are likely to be associated with criminal activity, as well as a lack of education and skills.
• Solving Racial Discrimination in the US: The Best Strategies The Hollywood representation of a black woman is often a magical hero who “is a virtuous black character who serves to better the lives of white people…and asks nothing for herself”.
• Popular Music at the Times of Racism and Segregation The following work will compare and contrast the compositions of Louis Armstrong and Scott Joplin and examine the impact of racism on popular music.
• Temporary Aid Program: Racism in Child Welfare The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program in the context of child welfare disparities.
• The Problem of Racism in the Police Force Atiba argues that the problem of racism, especially in the police force, is solvable. In most of the cases, it is often interpreted as lack of love and compassion towards people of the other race.
• Western Scientific Approach as a Cause of Racism This paper will highlight the main methods of refuting the works of racist anthropologists and how they influenced the emergence of stereotypes about people of color.
• How Does Racism Affect Health? Many people of color experience internalized racism, which can lead to anxiety and depression that can be the cause of physical issues.
• Citizen: An American Lyric and Systemic Racism In essence, the primary objective of the author is to trigger the readers’ thoughts towards the devastating racism situation in America and the world in general.
• The Reflection of Twain’s Views on Racism in Huck Finn One of the most problematic aspects in the novel that potentially can make readers think that Twain’s attitude toward slavery and racism is not laudable is the excessive usage of the n-word by all sorts […]
• Black as a Label: Racial Discrimination People are so used to identifying African Americans as black that they refuse to accept the possibility of the artificiality of labeling.
• The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Racial Discrimination The author argues that despite increasing the overall prosperity of the local communities, the policies and projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority did not address the well-being of the white population and Afro-American citizens equally.
• Flint Water Crisis: Environmental Racism and Racial Capitalism The Flint crisis is a result of the neoliberal approach of the local state as opposed to the typical factors of environmental injustice; a polluter or a reckless emitter cutting costs. The two main factors […]
• Cancer Alley and Environmental Racism One of the sources under study is valuable, as it examines the current situation of the coronavirus and the impact of pollution on human health.
• Cancer Alley and Environmental Racism in the US Bentlyewski and Juhn argue that the environmental racism in the country has been the result of aligning the public environmental policy and industrial activity to benefit the white majority and, at the same time, shifting […]
• American Healthcare in the Context of Racism According to the researchers, the fundamental issue of racism in health care is the practitioners and public health representatives’ lack of desire to recognize the health specifics of racial and ethnic minorities, which results in […]
• Origins of Modern Racism and Ancient Slavery The diversity of African kingdoms and the empires were engaged in the slave trade for hundreds of years prior to the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. The working and living condition of slaves were […]
• Contribution of Racism to Economic Recession Due to COVID-19 The historical injustice accounts for unequal employment opportunities and the economic profile of the minority groups. Therefore, economic recovery for the older Latinos and Blacks is limited due to the lack of flexible occupational benefits.
• What Stories Can Teach Us About Racism On top of this before the establishment of the school there was no public education for the Negro children and this made it more difficult for the children to access education just like the other […]
• Racism in Canadian Medical System The difference in the treatment of indigenous and non-indigenous individuals in Canada is a result of racism in the medical facility.
• Profit and Racism in the Prisons of the United States As an argument for the work of prisoners, the prison of Angola makes the argument that work is a way of rehabilitation for the prisoner.
• Rio Tinto: Case Study About Racism and Discrimination The repercussions of this situation for the preservation of cultural heritage may be considerable, as the expert community was denied an opportunity to research the artifacts.
• Racism: US v. The Amistad and Dred Scott v. Sandford In legal terms, the key difference between the two was that the Africans from Amistad were freeborn and enslaved in violation of the international agreements, while Dred Scott, despite his sojourn in Illinois, was born […]
• Critical Social Problems Research: Racism and Racial Domination According to his opinion, which is proven today by many examples including the attitude of the authorities, people of color are treated as if they are worthless and not destined to achieve success.
• Criminal Justice: Racial Prejudice and Racial Discrimination Souryal takes the reader through the racial prejudice and racial discrimination issues ranging from the temperament of racism, the fundamental premise of unfairness, the racial biasness and the causes of racial unfairness to ethical practices […]
• Gonzalez v. Abercrombie & Fitch Discrimination Racism Lawsuit: An Analysis The case was filed in June 2003, and the claim was that this company has grossly violated the rights of the citizens as provided for in the constitution of the country.
• The History of Racial Discrimination and Its Effects on the American Races The saddest part of it all is that our Indian American brothers are discussed in public and used as examples in a manner that makes it seem like they exist only as a mere caricature […]
• Racial Discrimination in the US Criminal Justice System This report argues that when one studies the proportion of blacks in the Cincinnati community and the number of times that they have been stopped for traffic violations, one finds that there is a large […]
• Policing in America: The Issue of Violence and Racism While the former proposition has various negative aspects to be considered, the latter appears to be the appropriate reaction to the challenges posed for the United States’ society in 2020.
• Institutional and Interpersonal Racism, White Privilege One should be aware of the fact that issues such as institutional and interpersonal racism, privilege, power, and bias are complex problems, which need a thorough analysis and consideration of all the facts.
• Anti-Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello For Shakespeare, Brabantio’s views are representative of the racial prejudice of the society in general, rather than of his personal feelings towards the protagonist. On the other hand, Othello’s story is cohesive and believable; he […]
• Racism and Sexism as a Threat Women suffer from sexism, people of color are affected by racism, and women of color are victims of both phenomena. Prejudices spread in families, communities, and are difficult to break down as they become part […]
• The Development of a Measure to Assess Symbolic Racism The originators of the concept applied it only to the African-American race, while other scientists engaged in researching and applying the construct of symbolic racism to other races and cultures.
• Racism and Tokenism in Bon Appetit: Leadership and Ethical Perspective Leadership is defined as a set of actions and beliefs of a manager who directs and controls the followers to achieve a common goal.
• From “Scientific” Racism to Local Histories of Lynching Both chapters serve as a premise to the following arguments in the book, arguing that White power is still dominant in the contemporary world, and give context to the broader scale of oppression worldwide.
• Subjective Assumptions and Medicine: Racism The given supposition demonstrates that Allen believed in the superiority of white southerners over Black Americans because the latter ones were made responsible for the deteriorated health of the former.
• Racism Experiences in the Workplace in the UK This research paper provides the background of racism in the UK, particularly in the area of employment. The UK struggles against racial discrimination and paves the way to equity and inclusion in the area of […]
• The History of Immigration to the United States and the Nature of Racism The development of the idea of race and ethnicity along with the idea of racial antagonism has two main stages in the history of the United States.
• Race and Racism in the USA: The Origins and the Future In conclusion, the author suggests that the possible solution to the problem of racial conflicts is the amalgamation of different races and ethnics.
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40+ Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism Worth Exploring

by  Antony W

April 21, 2023

The first step to write an essay on racism is to select the right topic to explore.

You then have to take a stance based on your research and use evidence to defend your position.

Even in a sensitive issue of racial discrimination, you have to consider the counterarguments highly likely to arise and address them accordingly. 

The goal of this list post is to give you some topic ideas that you can consider and explore.   We’ve put together 30+ topic ideas, so it should be easy to find an interesting issue to explore.

What is Racism?  

Racism is the conviction that we can credit capacities and qualities to individuals based on their race, color, ethnicity, or national origin. It can take the form of prejudice, hatred, and discrimination, and it can happen in any place and at any time.

Racism goes beyond the act of harassment and abuse. It stretches further to violence, intimidation, and exclusion from important group activities.

This act of judgment, prejudice, and discrimination easily reveal itself in the way we interact with people and our attitude towards them.

Some forms of racism , like looking at a person’s place of origin through a list of job applications, may not be obvious, but they play a part in preventing people or particular group from enjoying the dignity and equality of the benefits of life simply because they are different.

Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism  

• Is racism a type of mental illness in the modern society?
• Barrack Obama’s legacy hasn’t helped to improve the situation of racism in the United States of America
• The women’s movement of the 1960s did NOT unite black and white women
• Will racism eventually disappear on its own?
• Is there a cure for racism?
• There’s no sufficient evidence to prove that Mexicans are racists
• Is the difference in skin color the cause of racism in the western world?
• Racism isn’t in everyone’s heart
• Racism is a toxic global disease
• Will the human race ever overcome racial prejudice and discrimination?
• Can a racist be equally cruel?
• Should racism be a criminal offense punishable by death without the possibility of parole?
• Are racists more principled than those who are not?
• Can poor upbringing cause a person to become a racist?
• Is it a crime if you’re a racist?
• Can racism lead to another World War?
• The government can’t stop people from being racists
• Cultural diversity can cure racism
• All racists in the world have psychological problems and therefore need medical attention
• Can the government put effective measures in place to stop its citizens from promoting racism?
• Can a racist president rule a country better than a president who is not a racist?
• Should white and black people have equal rights?
• Can cultural diversity breed racism?
• Is racism a bigger threat to the human race?
• Racism is common among adults than it is among children
• Should white people enjoy more human rights than black people should?
• Is the disparity in the healthcare system a form of racial discrimination?
• Racial discrimination is a common thing in the United States of America
• Film industries should be regulated to help mitigate racism
• Disney movies should be banned for promoting racism
• Should schools teach students to stand against racism?
• Should parents punish their children for manifesting racist traits?
• Is racism the root of all evil?
• Can dialogue resolve the issue of racism?
• Is the seed of racism sown in our children during childhood?
• Do anti-racist movements help to unite people of different colors and race to fight racism?
• Do religious doctrines promote racism?
• There are no psychological health risks associated with racism
• Can movements such as Black Lives Matter stop racism in America?
• Do anti-racist movements help people to improve their self-esteem?
• Racism is against religious beliefs
• Can teaching children to treat each other equally help to promote an anti-racist world?

We understand that racism is such a controversial topic. However, it’s equally an interesting area to explore. If you wish to write an essay on racism but you have no idea where to start, you can pay for argumentative essay from Help for Assessment to do some custom writing for you.

If you hire Help for Assessment, our team will choose the most suitable topic based on your preference. In addition to conducting extensive research, we’ll choose a stance we can defend, and use strong evidence to demonstrate why your view on the subject is right. Get up to 15% discount here .

Is it Easy to Write an Argumentative Essay on Racism?

Racism is traumatic and a bad idea, and there must never be an excuse for it.

As controversial as the issue is, you can write an essay that explores this aspect and bring out a clear picture on why racism is such a bad idea altogether.

With that said, here’s a list of some argumentative essay topics on racism that you might want to consider for your next essay assignment.

How to Make Your Argumentative Essay on Racism Great 

The following are some useful writing tips that you can use to make your argumentative essay on racism stand out:

Examine the Historical Causes of Racism 

Try to dig deeper into the topic of racism by looking at historical causes of racial discrimination and prejudices.

Look at a number of credible sources to explore the connection between racism and salve trade, social developments, and politics.

Include these highlights in your essay to demonstrate that you researched widely on the topic before making your conclusion.

Demonstrate Critical Thinking 

Go the extra mile and talk about the things you believe people often leave out when writing argumentative essays on racism.

Consider why racial discrimination and prejudices are common in the society, their negative effects, and who benefits the most from racial policies.

Adding such information not only shows your instructor that you did your research but also understand the topic better.

Show the Relationship between Racism and Social Issues 

There’s no denying that racism has a strong connection with many types of social issues, including homophobia, slavery, and sexism.

Including these links, where necessary, and explaining them in details can make your essay more comprehensive and therefore worth reading.

related resources

• Argumentative Essay Topics on Medicine
• Argumentative Essay Topics About Animals
• Music Argumentative Essay Topics
• Social Media Argumentative Essay Topics
• Technology Argumentative Essay Topics

About the author 

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

An Essay for Teachers Who Understand Racism Is Real

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This essay is not to enumerate the recent murders of Black people by police, justify why protest and uprising are important for social change, or remind us why NFL player Colin Kaepernick took a knee. If you have missed those points, blamed victims, or proclaimed “All Lives Matter,” this article is not for you, and you may want to ask yourself whether you should be teaching any children, especially Black children.

This article is for teachers who understand that racism is real, anti-Blackness is real, and state-sanctioned violence, which allows police to kill Black people with impunity, is real. It is for teachers who know change is necessary and want to understand exactly what kind of change we need as a country.

Politicians who know the words “justice” and “equity” only when they want peace in the streets are going to try to persuade us that they are capable of reforming centuries of oppression by changing policies, adding more accountability measures, and removing the “bad apples” from among police.

More From This Author:

“Teachers, We Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were” “White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy” “How Schools Are ‘Spirit Murdering’ Black and Brown Students” “Dear White Teachers: You Can’t Love Your Black Students If You Don’t Know Them” “‘Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black”

These actions will sound comprehensive and, with time, a solution to injustice. These reforms may even reduce police killings or school suspensions of Black students, but as civil rights activist Ella Baker said, a “reduction of injustice is not the same as freedom.” Reformists want incremental change, but Black lives are being lost with every day we wait. And to be Black is to live in a constant state of exhaustion.

Centuries of Black resistance and protest have had a profound impact on the nation. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of “The 1619 Project,” points out, “We have helped the country to live up to its founding ideals. ... Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different—it might not be a democracy at all.” Those civil rights achievements were critical, including the reformist ones.

But reform is no longer enough. Too often, reform is rooted in Whiteness because it appeases White liberals who need to see change but want to maintain their status, power, and supremacy.

Abolition of oppression is needed because reform still did not stop a police officer from putting his knee on George Floyd’s neck in broad daylight for 8 minutes and 46 seconds; it did not stop police from killing Breonna Taylor in her own home. Also that: Largely non-White school districts get $23 billion less in state and local funding than predominantly White ones; Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 26 percent of the deaths from COVID-19; and with only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population. We need to be honest: We cannot reform something this monstrous; we have to abolish it.

Abolitionist Resources From Bettina L. Love

Organizations

• Free Minds, Free People
• Critical Resistance
• Black Youth Project 100
• Quetzal Education Consulting
• Assata’s Daughters
• Black Organizing Project
• Teachers 4 Social Justice
• “Reading Towards Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness”

Abolitionists want to eliminate what is oppressive, not reform it, not reimagine it, but remove oppression by its roots. Abolitionists want to understand the conditions that normalize oppression and uproot those conditions, too. Abolitionists, in the words of scholar and activist Bill Ayers, “demand the impossible” and work to build a world rooted in the possibilities of justice. Abolitionists are not anarchists because, as we eliminate these systems, we want to build conditions that create institutions that are just, loving, equitable, and center Black lives.

Abolitionism is not a social-justice trend. It is a way of life defined by commitment to working toward a humanity where no one is disposable, prisons no longer exist, being Black is not a crime, teachers have high expectations for Black and Brown children, and joy is seen as a foundation of learning.

Abolitionists strive for that reality by fighting for a divestment of law enforcement to redistribute funds to education, housing, jobs, and health care; elimination of high-stakes testing; replacement of watered-down and Eurocentric materials from educational publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with community-created standards and curriculum; the end of police presence in schools; employment of Black teachers en masse; hiring of therapists and counselors who believe Black lives matter in schools; destruction of inner-city schools that resemble prisons; and elimination of suspension in favor of restorative justice.

Abolitionist work is hard and demands an indomitable spirit of resistance. As a nation, we saw this spirit in Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. We also see it in 21st-century abolitionists like Angela Davis, Charlene Carruthers, Erica Meiners, Derecka Purnell, David Stovall, and Farima Pour-Khorshid.

For non-Black people, abolitionism requires giving up the idea of being an “ally” to become a “co-conspirator.” Many social-justice groups have shifted the language to “co-conspirator” because allies work toward something that is mutually beneficial and supportive to all parties. Co-conspirators, in contrast, understand how Whiteness and privilege work in our society and leverage their power, privilege, and resources in solidarity with justice movements to dismantle White supremacy. Co-conspirators function as verbs, not as nouns.

The journey for abolitionists and our co-conspirators is arduous, but we fight for a future that will never need to be reformed again because it was built as just from the beginning.

Related Video

In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this essay, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Here’s what she had to say:

A version of this article appeared in the June 17, 2020 edition of Education Week as For Teachers Who Understand Racism Is Real

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For black Americans, experiences of racial discrimination vary by education level, gender

Personal experiences with racial discrimination are common for black Americans. But certain segments within this group – most notably, those who are college educated or male – are more likely to say they’ve faced certain situations because of their race, according to a new Pew Research Center survey .

A majority of black adults say they have been discriminated against because of their race, but this varies by education. Roughly eight-in-ten blacks with at least some college experience (81%) say they’ve experienced racial discrimination, at least from time to time, including 17% who say this happens regularly. Among blacks with a high school education or less, these shares are lower – 69% and 9%, respectively.

When asked about specific situations they may have experienced because of their race, blacks who have attended college are more likely than those without college experience to say they have faced a number of these incidents: people acting as if they were suspicious of them (71% vs. 59%), people acting as if they were not smart (67% vs. 52%) or being subjected to slurs or jokes (58% vs. 45%). Half of blacks with at least some college experience also say they have feared for their personal safety because of their race. That share drops to about a third (34%) among those with less education.

College-educated blacks are also more inclined to believe their race has negatively impacted their ability to succeed: 57% of blacks with at least some college experience believe being black has hurt their ability to get ahead, compared with 47% of those with a high school education or less.

This pattern has been consistent across multiple surveys. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found similar educational gaps among blacks in experiences with discrimination. And a 2017 NPR poll found that being subjected to racial slurs or offensive comments was more common among blacks with a college degree than those with less education.

So why is this? Other researchers suggest that college-educated blacks are more likely to work in predominately white environments, which may lead to greater exposure to race-related prejudices or stresses. One scholar noted that college itself may offer blacks more opportunities to discuss race and discrimination through classes and organizations, thereby raising their awareness of these issues.

Beyond educational differences, experiences with certain forms of discrimination also differ by gender. This is most evident in reported interactions with law enforcement. In the new survey, 59% of black men say they have been unfairly stopped by the police because of their race, compared with 31% of black women. Black men are also more likely than black women to say people have acted as if they were suspicious of them, that they’ve been subjected to slurs or jokes, or that someone assumed they were racist or prejudiced because of their racial background.

Still, some experiences are equally common for both groups. Among blacks, similar shares of men and women say they have feared for their personal safety, that people have acted as if they were not smart, or that they’ve been treated unfairly in hiring, pay or promotion because of their race. There are also no gender differences when it comes to general experiences with racial discrimination.

Other factors are not strongly associated with facing specific types of discrimination. Black adults under the age of 50 are just as likely as those 50 and older to say they’ve faced certain situations because of their race. For example, 54% of blacks ages 18 to 49 say they have been subject to slurs or jokes because of their race, which is similar to the share among those 50 and older (50%). Additionally, skin tone is not necessarily correlated with encountering these types of situations. More specifically, blacks who identify as having lighter skin are about as likely as those with a deeper complexion to say they’ve faced specific situations because of their race.

• Black Americans
• Discrimination & Prejudice
• Race & Ethnicity
• Racial Bias & Discrimination

Monica Anderson is a director of research at Pew Research Center

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The Electoral College’s Racist Origins

More than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern white voters, the system continues to do just that.

Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.

In Shelby County ’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “ Why the South Must Prevail ,” white Americans are “ entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

Read more: The Electoral College was terrible from the start

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy , succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise , the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar , the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election , the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.

The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South , their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy . It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.

Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.

Read more: The Electoral College conundrum

More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases . Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.

This story is part of the project “ The Battle for the Constitution ,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center .

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John McWhorter

I’m a columbia professor. the protests on my campus are not justice..

By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is “4'33",” which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.

I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza war would view them that way. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

I understand this to a point. Pro-Palestinian rallies and events, of which there have been many here over the years, are not in and of themselves hostile to Jewish students, faculty and staff members. Disagreement will not always be a juice and cookies affair. However, the relentless assault of this current protest — daily, loud, louder, into the night and using ever-angrier rhetoric — is beyond what any people should be expected to bear up under, regardless of their whiteness, privilege or power.

Social media discussion has been claiming that the protests are peaceful. They are, some of the time . It varies by location and day; generally what goes on within the campus gates is somewhat less strident than what happens just outside them. But relatively constant are the drumbeats. People will differ on how peaceful that sound can ever be, just as they will differ on the nature of antisemitism. What I do know is that even the most peaceful of protests would be treated as outrages if they were interpreted as, say, anti-Black, even if the message were coded, as in a bunch of people quietly holding up MAGA signs or wearing T-shirts saying “All lives matter.”

And besides, calling all this peaceful stretches the use of the word rather implausibly. It’s an odd kind of peace when a local rabbi urges Jewish students to go home as soon as possible, when an Israeli Arab activist is roughed up on Broadway, when the angry chanting becomes so constant that you almost start not to hear it and it starts to feel normal to see posters and clothing portraying members of Hamas as heroes. The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.

I understand that the protesters and their fellow travelers feel that all of this is the proper response, social justice on the march. They have been told that righteousness means placing the battle against whiteness and its power front and center, contesting the abuse of power by any means necessary. And I think the war on Gaza is no longer constructive or even coherent.

However, the issues are complex, in ways that this uncompromising brand of power battling is ill suited to address. Legitimate questions remain about the definition of genocide, about the extent of a nation’s right to defend itself and about the justice of partition (which has not historically been limited to Palestine). There is a reason many consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the most morally challenging in the modern world.

When I was at Rutgers in the mid-1980s, the protests were against investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. There were similarities with the Columbia protests now: A large group of students established an encampment site right in front of the Rutgers student center on College Avenue, where dozens slept every night for several weeks. Among the largely white crowd, participation was a badge of civic commitment. There was chanting, along with the street theater inevitable, and perhaps even necessary, to effective protest; one guy even lay down in the middle of College Avenue to block traffic, taking a page from the Vietnam protests.

I don’t recall South Africans on campus feeling personally targeted, but the bigger difference was that though the protesters sought to make their point at high volume, over a long period and sometimes even rudely, they did not seek to all but shut down campus life.

On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

John McWhorter ( @JohnHMcWhorter ) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “ Nine Nasty Words : English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “ Woke Racism : How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @ JohnHMcWhorter

What campus protests at ASU and elsewhere are really about. It's poisonous.

Opinion: revolutionary thinking is turning american universities into fever swamps of antisemitism and worse..

At the height of the pandemic and the race protests of summer 2020, one of the more perceptive thinkers in American journalism, Peter Savodnik, wrote a haunting essay for Tablet magazine.

Amid all the upheaval in the country, his mind had wandered back to 2012 and the quietude of rural Vermont, when he taught a retreat course at Middlebury College on the intersection of Russian literature and politics. 

That summer he guided 18 students, “mostly freshmen and sophomores,” on an excursion of 1860s Russia by way of three novels of that time — Ivan Turgenev’s "Fathers and Sons," Fyodor Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" and Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s "What Is to Be Done?"

“I focused on the 1860s because that was when everything seemed to pivot just so,” he wrote, “and the arc of history started to bend in a more precarious direction, toward a precipice that few could have foreseen more than a half-century before the revolution.”

An ominous message posted by ASU students 

Since reading Savodnik’s long and prescient essay in a magazine devoted to Jewish perspectives on news and culture, I have since recommended it to friends and family so they too may be haunted. 

I’ve not stopped thinking about it for years and have returned to it often. 

It was on my mind again several weeks ago when one of the student political organizations at Arizona State University found itself in big trouble with the administration. 

MECHA de ASU had joined the maelstrom of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian protests across the nation and, according to ASU’s student newspaper, The State Press, had posted an ominous message on Instagram:

“Death to boer. Death to the Pilgrim. Death to the zionist. Death to the settler."

Anyone who follows international news would instantly recognize “Death to boer (sic)” as similar to the expression of South African populist Julius Malema, who has called on his followers to “Kill the Boer!”, frequently with his hand held in the shape of a pistol.

American businessman Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, said Malema is calling for the murder of South Africa’s white farmers – “for the genocide of white people in South Africa.” 

But Malema and others in South Africa have argued “Kill the Boer!” is merely an old protest slogan and song lyric of apartheid South Africa and does not literally mean to kill white people.

That didn’t stop The Economist in February from asking, “Is Julius Malema the most dangerous man in South Africa?” 

In Mecha de ASU’s Instagram, it also calls for death to “pilgrim,” “zionist” (sic) and “settler,” which should be interpreted as that group’s embrace of “decolonization” or the “global intifada” — the effort to unwind white control of land, property and government across parts of mostly the global north, including North America.

Mecha de ASU is playing with fire 

We should interpret it that way, because that’s how Mecha de ASU describes its goals in its mission statement:

“Mechistas must take it upon themselves to organize and politicize our communities to build power to enact liberatory politics. This means not only combating the legacies of colonization such as capitalism and white supremacy, but creating a movement that centers Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, and Femme people.” 

If you’ve wondered how any LGBTQ people could support the Palestinians, who would brutally abuse them for their sexuality, here’s why. 

The campus movement is about bigger things than the children of the Gaza Strip. It’s about power. 

As the Mecha de ASU mission statement explains...

“...we must devote ourselves to ending settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, heteronormativity, borders and prisons because our liberation does not exist until these legacies of colonization are abolished. ...   MECHA values are rooted in anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, anti-heteropatriarchy, anti-imperialism, and antiracism.”

After the Instagram post, the university administration placed Mecha de ASU on interim suspension for violating the university code of conduct, the State Press reported.

In an October 2023 statement, ASU officials had written that the school fosters "a safe and inclusive environment," and "respectful conversations that promote mutual understanding and empathy," the State Press reported.

I’ve listened to some of Mecha de ASU’s podcasts, and they sound like pretty nice young people. But they are playing with fire. 

College protests are about global intifada, not just Gaza

It’s the kind of fire that turned into a conflagration at Columbia University this past week.

Pro-Palestinian student protesters swarmed the campus as Jewish students and parents recorded them telling them to “go back to Europe,” “go back to Poland,” “you have no culture,” “all you do is colonize.” 

Other protesters celebrated the slaughter of 1,200 mostly civilian Israeli Jews on Oct. 7, praised the Hamas killers, told Jewish students on campus that Oct. 7 will happen again and again “not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times!” 

That prompted a New York rabbi to tell Columbia’s Jewish students to leave campus and stay away until things have “dramatically improved.” 

The danger of decolonization ideology 

After the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, students at many of America’s elite universities celebrated the Hamas atrocities and accused the Israelis of war crimes for their counterstrike on Gaza.

That turned into a rallying cry: “Decolonization is not a metaphor.”

In reaction, British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore write an essay in The Atlantic magazine headlined, “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False.”

“This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. 

“But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the ‘oppressed’ to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an ‘oppressor’ to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as ‘white’ and ‘privileged.’”

As Peter Savodnik reflected back on his leafy retreat in Vermont, he noted that “the metaphysical gap between mid-19th-century Russia and early-21st-century America is narrowing. The parallels between them then and us now, political and social but mostly characterological, are becoming sharper, more unavoidable.”

In those 1860s Russian novels you find parallels to today’s United States, he wrote, “the coarsening of the culture, our economic woes, our political logjams, the opportunism and fecklessness of our so-called elites, the corruption of our institutions, the ease with which we talk about “revolution,” the anger, the polarization, the anti-Semitism.” 

We may want to believe that what is happening at our universities can be contained to that ivory-tower world, but that would be a mistake, writes Savodnik.

“It is true that the decisions that shape our daily lives are mostly made in faraway cities, but the ideas that inform those decisions are learned, promulgated, hotly debated on campus.”

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected].

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Kirsten Fleming

‘fat liberation,’ decolonization rants and pro-palestinian chants have no place in medical school.

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The honchos at this medical school need a check-up from the neck up.

The David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA should be tasked with educating the great doctors of tomorrow. But, according to a slew of recent reports, they’re more interested in churning out an army of social justice warriors with stethoscopes.

First-year medical students are required to take a “Structural Racism and Health Equity” course, implemented as antiracist atonement programming in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 death. By most accounts, it’s unnecessarily feeding a cancer of wokeness.

Earlier this month, students were forced to listen to Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia , a pro Hamas speaker who led the class in chants of “Free, free Palestine,” called modern medicine “white science” and demanded they pray to “Mama Earth.”

There are lessons on “decolonization” and “climate activism.” There used to be a class exercise that divided students into racial groups, but that was canceled in January after a civil rights complaint.

The latest revelation about the course syllabus, however, takes the cake — and it’s a multi-tiered concoction frosted with radical and unscientific proclamations about obesity and health.

According to the Washington Free Beacon , Geffen students are required to read “No Health, No Care: The Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath,” an essay by Marquisele Mercedes. A self-proclaimed “fat liberationist,” Mercedes believes obesity is a slur “used to exact violence on fat people” — specifically, “Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people”

“Fatphobia,” she writes, “is medicine’s status quo.”

The essay — which begins with an unsatisfactory medical experience Mercedes says she had as a 13-year-old visiting a slim, white, blonde doctor — is a self-centered, indulgent rant from a proudly overweight academic simply trying to justify her own size.

It’s also a nonsensical ode to victimhood that force feeds the reader a smorgasbord of intersectionality terms and traces the “origins of fatphobia” to white European Enlightenment philosophers.

And how quaint to picture it: Jean-Jacques Rouseau fat-shaming a female dinner guest, making loud pig noises as she takes a bite of her second helping of bread.

But there’s more. Mercedes makes many dubious claims — calling the relationship between weight and health “muddy” and claiming “it is proven that weight loss is a useless, hopeless endeavor.”

We know that everyone’s bodies are different and weight loss can be affected by a myriad of issues, including genetics and underlying medical problems. We’re constantly learning new lessons about trimming fat — but none of them say, “Don’t, if you’re obese.”

But take it from Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School Flier, who said the course “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”

“This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups,” Flier told the Washington Free Beacon. He added that teaching these “ignorant” ideas to medical students is nothing less than “malpractice.”

Flier said: “[UCLA] has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate. As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”

Personally , I want a doctor who is going to call balls and strikes — and who isn’t petrified of having difficult conversations about how lifestyle choices may be affecting overall health.

Not someone who was indoctrinated by the high priestess of fatness or a person who turned corpulence into a new religion.

This essay belongs at a spoken-word open-mic night —  not in a medical school tasked with sending competent doctors into the world.

If they don’t trim the fat from this storied institution, a UCLA medical degree will become patient repellent. Run if you see it hanging on a doc’s wall.

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