Racism - Descripiton, History, Modern Racism

Essay by mattl February 2005

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Beginning:

Today I'm going to talk about a topic, which unfortunately influences the society in Austria more and more - Racism. Nowadays we live in a multicultural society that means that our country consists of many different ethnical and cultural groups. So I'm going to explain the definition of racism and why it's possible that this kind of hatred between different cultures can occur.

First of all I want to tell something about the structure in my presentation. In the first part I'm going to explain the basics and the definitions of the word racism. In the second part I'm going to show you some important historical periods where racism occurred and in the last part I'm going to tell you how racism is included in our society today and which reasons racist people have for their ideology.

Theory:

The first expression I'm going to declare is the word "race".

Besides this word is in my opinion rightly controversial, it describes a distinct population of humans distinguished in some way from other humans. The first real racial classification was written by made at the end of the 17th century, where some scientists split the humans into four main-groups - the European group, the Asian group and the African group and the Indian or American Group. But at this time there was no racist idea behind that, they only did it to distinguish the peoples by their skin colour, facial type, cranial profile and size, texture and colour of hair. But after some time, in the period of the enlightenment these main-groups were split into several sub-groups like East-European or Alpine European and some characteristics were assigned to these groups. Now we know that these views are old-fashioned because new conclusions in the modern gene-research tell us that the differences in...