Racism on College Campuses

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This debate group and paper will deal with the subject of racism and specifically racism on college campuses. Is racism a problem on college campuses or not? I think in order to answer that question we must first define racism in a social problem context. According to our text, Social Problems in a Diverse Society, “racism is a set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices used to justify the superior treatment of one racial ethnic group and the inferior treatment of another racial or ethnic group” (Kendall 52). For the most part, the white race is typically the culprit for being racist towards minority groups, although, blacks can be racist towards Hispanics and vise versa. Secondly, “a social problem is a social condition that harms some or all people in a society and a sufficient numbers of those people are concerned and see a need for change” (Kendall 4). Now that we have clear definitions of the aspects we are dealing with we can now apply them to the “society,” which in this paper, will refer to college campuses. In the US, there are over 4,000 college campuses where the student population is comprised of a variety of races, ethnic backgrounds, and cultures (Silver Smith). However, typically speaking most college campuses have a predominately-white student body and minorities make up a smaller percentage of said population. Although, according to most reports, minority enrollment is up and steadily growing, especially amongst African American and Hispanic students, there remains to be a gap in comparison to white enrollment (Ace Report 1). That being said, I believe that it is important that we realize that just because there is diversity on our college campuses, simple exposure to minorities should not be mistaken for tolerance. I think that for the most part, in today’s society, people do not necessarily voice their opinions when it comes to other
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