What is race? Dictionary.com defines the word race as "A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution." This definition however, is not entirely accurate. Omi and Winant give a better definition of race in their article entitled "Racial Formations," because they look at the topic of race from multiple perspectives. Race takes on a different form in each of these different disciplines, including biology and sociology. Each of these individual ideas contradicts each other, but it is the joining of all of these ideas that gives society the best conceptual classification of race. It is because race is not only a biological issue, or an economic issue, or a political issue, or a social issue, but it is in fact a working fusion of all of them. Race is becoming more and more important in everyday life, because new areas of the world are becoming racialized. This means that issues that were previously a non-racial issue, including the economy and government are starting to become racial issues, and there is no stopping it.
             Because skin color is the most obvious identifying factor about a person, it makes it that much easier for others to classify that individual as being similar or different to themselves. Due to this fact, blacks have been easily discriminated against over time, because they look different from the whites, who are in power. From the 17th century to the civil rights movement and later, blacks have been considered as inferior to whites. This was not always the case however; up until the mid to late 1700s, black and white slaves existed side by side. There was no distinct boundary line drawn because of skin color. This concept was done away with, because the whites who owned slaves did not feel as though people like themselves should be treated just like the other-colored slaves.
             Even after the abolition of...