Essay, Research Paper: Racism

Racism has become one of the many burdens amongst multi-cultural countries all over the world. Racism is a part of each and every one of us. No doubt, we are all racist, but this term racism has been used too loosely. Racism has been changed to such an extent that it could be a reason for war, a symbol of terrorism, and even an excuse for neglecting. Is that all there is to it? No, actually it is just the beginning. Racism is just like warfare in which there is no shelter and nobody is neutral. Even if you say you are neutral if you are not helping the problem, you are just contributing to it.
People are afraid of the unknown, and people act stupidly when they are afraid. Like for instances in the earlier stages of the US. African Americans were forced to be slaves and when people started to free their slaves a Ku Klux Klan was developed to scare these people out of their towns because they were afraid of them because they were different. This Klan even though only meant to scare these people started to go a lot farther.
The Klan started as a social club back in 1866 but just a year after it started to spread across the US. So much hate built up in the Klan they started to do other things than just scare. They would do such things as violent threats to make them leave their town and even such things as shootings and hangings just because they had a different skin color. Most of this was going on in the south, north didn't like what they were doing, and they thought the slaves should be free. Soon this resulted in a civil war and many people died because of this hate some men had toward African Americans.
Many people died in the civil war because of racism but not as many as in World War 2. This war was started when Germany's dictator Adolph Hitler invaded Poland in hopes to purify to the world of all blacks and Jews because he thought that whites were a superior race.
In WW2, over 17 million troops were killed and the number of civilian casualties was countless due to starvation, bomb raids, epidemics, massacres and other war-related causes. All this because one man thought his nation would be more powerful if he illuminated what he thought was the lower class. However, his plan was not effective other countries saw what he was doing, after a long and bloody war, he was stopped, and to this day Germany's economy still suffers for his mistakes. Nevertheless, even this wasn't enough for people to learn from his mistakes and see that racism only weakens a power, because it still goes on today.
Just a few weeks ago, a situation went on in Littleton. Some very angry and troubled kids came into there school with guns and bombs and sought out people of certain races and killed them just because of the color of there skin. This proves that although we might not think that racism is a problem anymore it is.
There are obvious cases of racism and there are not so obvious. For instance the massacre at Littleton was pretty obvious and just about everybody heard about but their cases of not as dramatic racism everyday. Like at school just in the halls you can see racism from people harassing other people about how they don't agry with ones culture or the way the dress and automatically judge them. this happens to everybody but that doesn't mean it is right. We as a people need to catch and correct ourselves so we can live in harmony with others.