Vedantam Shades Of Prejudice Summary

Everyone who lives in America is aware of the racial prejudices that have blighted our country since its founding. Racism runs rampant throughout American history, and while there is no doubt that there have been great strides in improving racial relations, it is still a major issue today. It is a conspicuous problem, and because it is so obvious ,it is one that most of us strive to fight against. Shankar Vedantam, in his essay Shades of Prejudice, tells us of a more insidious form of prejudices, one that infects not only our country, but great parts of the world; a strong bias against darker skin tones, which he calls colorism.
Vedantam defines colorism as “an unconscious prejudice that isn’t focused on a single group like blacks so much as on blackness itself” (190). He claims that this form of prejudice is not limited to how other races perceive a person; an individual’s skin tone can bias how members of his or her own race will respond to them (191). This negative connotation to darker color skin is partially illustrated by the great popularity of skin lightening makeup in India, and in the hundreds of mercury poisoning cases among Mexican-American woman from the use of skin-whiting creams (190). It is apparent that a great number of people around the world, on some level, think that lighter-colored skins
While I was cognizant of this form of prejudice in American, I did not know many of the details that Vedantam used, nor was I aware that it affected other cultures around the world. I did disagree with Vedantam when he stated the Democratic Senator Harry Reid’s comments that Barack Obama benefited politically from his light skin and dialect somehow “punctured the myth that Mr. Oboma’s election signaled the completion of the Rev. King’s dream” (192). Mr. Obama’s wining the presidency was a triumphant moment in the history of equality in our country, but we all knew that it was not the end of