Every attempt to reproduce an image on a certain stereotypical issue runs into paradox that creates particular patterns of personal schemata of the world. The concept of racism provokes in the subconsciousness a picture of perception that is based on visual senses and mainly distorts what a human seems to see. Therefore, in the developed contemporary societies the topics concerning the color of skin need to be revised and to some extent differentiated from the previously popular images and stereotypes. Unfortunately, within this stereotypical view in terms of ‘whiteness’ some people preserve a stable racist practice that mistakenly reinforces white supremacy.
‘Whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ conceptualization, exercised by individual’s mind, has its retrospective sources of emergence. The reasons of its origin lie neither in the Bible essence nor in human genetics. The Bible itself is color-blind, racial appearances are rarely specified, so race “is a constructor, an interpretation of nature rather than unambiguous marker of basic natural differences within humankind” (Kidd, 2006). Thus, the fact proves to be relevant in an assumption of social-psychological roots of these concepts’ construction. The issues concerning races are considered to be social constructs that are made up by people and due to their cultural viewpoints. The paradox in terms of racism is viewed from the stereotypical angle and by means of absence of the exact figure of world races. Nonetheless, ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ are socially constructed identifiers that are partially influenced by cultural, political, religious or non-religious convictions.
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Since 1927, T. Thomas Fortune Fletcher’s words “If God is white, why should I pray? If I called him, he’d turn away” from his White God contain the vivid connotation of religious racialism that may be judged as the example of a certain culture (Bay, 2000). By this, the narrative of racism and religion interaction is driven from the biblical interpretations and a peculiar white thought in the black mind. Kidd provides his recipients with the samples of heated debates on the topic of whether Jesus was white or black involving the notion of white Christianity and the attitude of colored people toward considerations of that kind of matter. From perspective of such liberation theologians as Albert Cleage and James Cone, Jesus is mainly racialized to be black as in the exact same way some whites consider him to be white. Thereafter in his research, Kidd states that “black racialized religion constituted a mirror image of its white counterparts” (Kidd, 2006).
The white image inside the black mind contains the commentary on white people in terms of African American culture. The perception of a white human changed due to the time span and through the historical lessons in the study of racism. In a majority of cases the image of ‘whiteness’ was altered to some extent when an African became the African American (Bay, 2000). Though the colored people’s thinking of whites as the race was not so fruitful in comparison to white Americans’ discussions on the racial issues concerning black images, in the literary works a plenty of interpretations conformably to white image in the black consciousness may be found. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the mid-nineteenth century novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe, provides the reader with the title character who is the representative of a strong willingness to be a human, a noble personality and in accordance with that time crucial situation of slavery ‘whiter’ than whites in terms of his beliefs and attitude toward others. By this, the white image inside Tom’s mind is meant, namely his being independent and metaphorically white in the contrary to white people. A little bit later, in 1975 Doctorow in his novel Ragtime revealed the notion of racism by means of musical terms in the form of syncopation that tends to be the highest level of mastery of depicting that time injustice toward African Americans. In the beginning of the narrative a main character Coalhouse Walker seems to have a similar image of ‘whiteness’ that makes him deserve to have equal rights with the people who own another color of skin.