ACCORDING TO OUR TEXTBOOK RACISM IS THE SET OF INSTITUTIONAL

practices that create advantages for people legally defined and socially constructed as “white”, and the corollary disadvantages for people defined as belonging to racial groups that were not considered Whites by the dominant power structure in the United States.

The first big idea about racism that I thought was powerful was when the first European settlers came to what is now American and used race to dominate and enslave the Native Americans. As Carmelita (Rosie) Castaneda and Ximena Zuniga state in their writings on Racism on page 58 of our textbooks, “Like other constructed social identities addressed throughout this book, race emerged historically in