Racism in America

Racism In America Race is a socially constructed category. Society assigns races to people based on opinion and social experience. If races are socially constructed, then racism must also be an offshoot of race and derived from social experiences too. Racism, as defined by Webster’s New American Dictionary, is “a belief that some races are by nature superior to others.” Why is there racism in America today? There are two distinct schools of thought; the social psychologists and the sociological theorists. There are two social psychological theories. The scapegoat theory, that argues “historically, members of the dominant group in the United States have harbored various frustrations in their desire to achieve social and economic success” and vent these frustrations in the form of anger towards other racial groups (Andersen, Taylor, 291). The authoritarian theory “is characterized by a tendency to rigidly characterize people” (Andersen, Taylor, 291). The sociological theories focus more on institutional racism. Racism appears to be a mixture of the scapegoat, authoritarian, and sociological theories. While majority of the people automatically characterize people into groups,