Racism

In the novel Maus II by Art Spiegelman you hear first hand from a survivor of Auschwitz the experiences of the holocaust and the horrific consequences of racism. Race is something that has developed over time and is constantly changing. Race is something that is seen differently by different people. “There is a continuous temptation to think of race as an essence, as something fixed, concrete, and objective. And there is also an opposite temptation: to imagine race as a mere illusion” (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Identity 183). Race can be seen as something concrete or as something changing. “The effort must be made to understand race as an unstable and “decentered” complex of social meaning constantly being transformed by political struggles” (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Identity 183). Race hasn’t been and will never be something that is set in stone and will never change. As society progresses and changes over time, so will the definition and make up of race and racism. “We should think of race as an element of social structure rather than as an irregularity within it, we should see race as a dimension of human representation rather than an illusion” (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Identity 184). The most common definition for race (the word definition is used very lightly because race is something that is always changing) is “race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Identity 183). Race is something that distinguishes “different” human beings apart from one another. Sometimes in the end result of this some humans are put “higher” or at a level of greater important than others. One of the first encounters of race was when the “European explores reached the Western Hemisphere.” It was there that they first discovered “people who looked and acted differently. These ‘natives’ challenged their ‘discovers’