While that line of thinking is seductive, because it suggests an easy solution for complex problems, like racism; West believes that the real solutions will require people to question their own fundamental assumptions about power and its relationship to racism. Specifically, West talks about how racism is inherently linked to classification, and, in fact, that "the genealogy of racism in the modern West is inseparable from the appearance of

Whites generally were associated with roles including plantation overseers and supervisors or small proprietors; free non-whites generally suffered from circumscribed social and political abilities prior to the revolution (Knight, 2005). While their wealth and education may place them about smaller merchants and proprietors in the white class, they were still not held to the highest castes or ranks. Slaves were often distinguished as property and subject to coercion and

Race, Ethnicity, And Utopia The idea of a perfect society is very important in human cultures everywhere. Most cultures and religions talk about a time long ago when the world was perfect. Stories of long lost "golden ages" or the "Garden of Eden" hold memories of a better world that has been somehow left behind. When those longings are expressed in speculative fiction, dreamers may imagine the existence of a fantastical

Certainly this is a key theme in books by diverse authors (Malamud, Tan, etc.). It is the very institutionalization of race that causes it to continue and perpetuate when, quite easily we see that figures such as James Baldwin and others, working in the 1920s and 1930s in Harlem, could begin the long road to overcoming White supremacy. What does the "impact of modernity" mean to traditional cultures of the

Louis presented an exhibition of different races as artifacts or curiosities, to demonstrate where civilization had 'come from' in the past, versus the images of civilized 'future.' The designers of the exhibit saw the supposed progress of science and civilization as a series of examples of how whites had successfully born 'the white man's burden.' The exhibit showed the benefits of slavery in educating the African races as well

In fact, the American Revolution may have served to assert the natural rights of some people, but those people were limited to a class of white males. It is important to keep in mind that one of the ideological underpinnings of the Revolution was a challenge to imperialist ideals, and race-based oppression and slavery had long been major parts of the imperial system. Despite that, it is unfair to characterize