Racism is the opinion that certain groups of people have distinctive social attributes relating to physical appearance or tendencies and can be partitioned dependent on the predominance of one race over another. It might likewise mean bias, segregation, or threat coordinated against others since they are of an alternate race or ethnicity.
Current variations of prejudice are regularly founded on the social view of natural contrasts between groups of people. These perspectives can appear as social activities, practices, convictions, or political frameworks in which various races are positioned as characteristically better or second rate than one another, in view of assumed shared inheritable attributes, capacities, or characteristics.
Racism has its roots back, from the colonization period, where White people, considered Africans as unfit to be treated as humans, because of some utterly bizarre reasons of being some shades darker. Not only did they colonize the lesser-known communities, but also weakened the roots of places like India, and laced the idea of a human being superior to the other, simply based on the color of the skin.
Racism is not a singular event in history that disappears. It gets passed on from one generation to another and becomes predominant in defining the concept and parameters of how beauty is defined and solidifying institutionalized racism. The Africans aren’t the only people who suffer. All other people of color subjected to brutalism of racism.
A child as young as five years old is made to realize that a doll that has blue eyes, and pale skin shade is the ideal concept of attractive rather than a colored doll. This is what racism does to children. We’re made to mold our minds according to the ‘societal ideals’ of beauty. It is still predominant in the Indian society, that a girl who is ‘fair’ is more attractive and is likely to be married to a groom who is affluent.
This concept makes girls believe, that tanned skin is a sign of something which is repulsive to the eye and needs to be changed. Thus, pushing many young girls to undergo laser treatment, use skin brightening creams, which does very little to the skin improvement, but massively harms their self-confidence.
The recent death of George Floyd is a classic example of how racism is deep-rooted in our society and needs to eradicated before it corrodes humanity globally. Acceptance and tolerance of a person however he/she looks, irrespective of the physical appearance is something which should be made innate. This would be the only stepping stone to the betterment and evolution of us as a society, where people of every caste, creed, religion, and color are accepted and treated equally on the radar.
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