Research Paper on:
Racism in the U.S.

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
blood, no matter how small, was used to legitimize slavery (Yancey 197). Due to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and subsequent legislation, the legal framework supporting racism has  been dismantled and, theoretically at least, the U.S. is presumably free of racism. However, racist attitudes persist in a number of more subtle ways than those previously supports by segregation  laws. For example, white racism promotes an ethos that places more value and social status on those African Americans who have lighter skin color (Yancey 197). Furthermore, the racially  constructed nature of white identity plays a significant role in facilitating greater access to social and economic resources (Yancey 197). These actions are often not interpreted as racist, but rather  as enjoying the familiarity that comes from being in close contact with people who have similar backgrounds and experiences. In other words, a white business executive is not being conscious  racist when he hires an white, male who graduated from the same university he did, but it is racist nonetheless. As Fr. Bryan N. Massingale pointed out when speaking to  the Catholic Theological Society of America in 2008, racism "can exist even in denial" ("Our faith" 30). The research conducted by Mayeno, et al, shows how racism affected the  lives of two young people, an Asian American, Seung-Hui Cho, and Kekoa, a Native Hawaiian. Both of these young men faced pervasive racism, but the detrimental effects of racism were  more dramatic in regards to Seung-Hui, who opened fire on his peers at Virginia Tech, killing 32 people and wounding others before committing suicide (Mayeno, et al 7). Seung-Hui came  to the U.S. from Korea when he was 8 years old. Throughout middle school and high school, his classmates ridiculed him, telling him "go back to China" (Mayeno, et al