Environmental racism

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

5 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

10/01/2009

Category :

Social studies

Sub category :

Sociology

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Summary :

Introduction
Aftermath of the holocaust
The civil rights movement
Barrack Obama's election
The rise of global capitalism
Definition of environmental justice
The environmental justice movement
The goal of the environmental justice movement
Sandra Steingraber's 'Living Downstream'
Conclusion

Abstract

According to Fredrickson, America was able to largely ignore the "race question" until the American Revolution. Before the war for independence, Jews were mostly sequestered in ghettos and black people on plantations, so the need for a dominating racial ideology had not yet arisen. However, with the dawning of the Enlightenment and the democratic revolution, the idea that all men are created equal was at the front of the minds of the people. Therefore, some system had to be invented to demote blacks and Jews from the status of "men" if absolute white rule was to continue uninterrupted.
The American answer to this need was a "scientific" racism called the "American School of Ethnology," which went against the Christian idea that all humans are descended from Adam by positing that the three main races present in the United States at that time, whites, blacks, and Native Americans, were in fact different species with different personality traits and levels of ability. By this logic, all men were still created equal: those who were unequal were not men. This ideology gained popularity in response to the abolitionist movement that began in the 1830's : without the free labor provided by the slaves, the southern cotton market could no longer thrive, and so southern whites had a strong motivation to keep blacks in servitude.