Racism In The Jewish Holocaust

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Pages: 8

Racism
The textbook Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice defines racism as “the systematic subordination of targeted racial groups who have relatively little power in the United States, by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power” (Adams, Bell, & Griffin). This definition can extend to other countries where less powerful racial groups are target by more dominant groups. Racism can take many forms, from everyday racism where people are deemed inferior in other people’s minds, to racism that segregates certain races from others, to the extreme form of racism seen in the Jewish holocaust.
Racism played a prevalent part in the Jewish holocaust. Judaism was considered a race, not a religious or cultural
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These laws discriminated against the Jewish people even further and institutionalized the Nazi party’s anti-Semitic views. The first Nuremburg Law, the Reich Citizenship Law, outlined how to determine if one was Jewish. A person was considered Jewish if they had three or four Jewish grandparents. Many people who were classified as Jewish under this law had no connection to the Jewish faith both in belief and practice. The Reich Citizenship Law took away German citizenship and rights from anyone who fit the definition of a Jew. The second Nuremburg Law, the Law for Protection of German Blood and German Honor banned marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. This was done in order to ‘purify’ the German …show more content…
Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800 thousand Rwandans were killed over the course of 100 days. The genocides largely stemmed from racial differences between two groups- the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis (BBC News). The violence was instigated by the assassination of the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana (Power 2013). The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), composed of Tutsis people, was considered responsible for the president’s death. The Rwandan government retaliated with an order to slaughter all of the Tutsis people (Gellately and Kiernan 2003). Many non-military people followed this order, “thousands of ordinary Hutu men, women, and children followed the dictates and orders of government functionaries” (Gellately and Kiernan 2003, 125). These people used whatever weapons they had at hand to kill their neighbors, the Tutsis people. What resulted was the mass murder of close to 1 million Tutsi people at an alarmingly fast