Genealogy of Modern Racism - Synopsis

The author in this essay talks about racism in great detail while trying to figure out what started this and made the whites feel so superior. He believes that the whites have been forced to treat the blacks in such a way because that is what they have been learning all their lives. He mentions the workings and teachings of science, philosophy and the Classical revival which play a great part in creating and setting rules and norms for the people of a society. According to these rules and the culture that one survives in, Cornel West feels that science has forced man to compare human forms and other things according to their physical traits. The scientific revolution’s main ideas were ‘observation and evidence’, hence, looks are first observed and compared and this is the reason why blacks are differentiated by the whites. The power of science promotes the comparison between the whites and the blacks.

The author lays stress on how from the very start there were works on the concept of beauty in the forms of writings and art. All these works mentioned beauty that was exactly that of the whites, setting rules of how one’s beauty is to be measured. Therefore, the concept of perfection and beauty was allowed to only revolve around the white as they were the exact picture in the works of different artists, making the blacks seem not just ugly but low as well.

The color of the skin tone is somewhat a universal platform to mark differences and thus in this case there is stark difference which causes blacks to look at themselves as inferior to the whites. The gaze has been mentioned with great emphasis in the essay and the author feels that this is what separates one human form from another and that the first thing that the gaze looks at is the color and the features, highlighting the point that physical characteristics are given most priority.

Also West argues that though every writer has mentioned the differences between the blacks and whites but most of them have been against the idea of the blacks being equal to the whites in any form. He says that it was thought to be irrational to even think of the blacks to become equal to the whites in beauty, culture and intelligence (as said in the essay). They feel that the blacks, apart from the physical differences, were also not intelligent enough and few have even challenged to name any black who has done a great deed in the world. And these were the reasons why the whites felt that only they were deserving of the high posts and elite positions of the society refusing to consider the blacks anywhere near them.