How would Frederickson recalculates the definition of 'self-evident truths' - Essay Example

Based on his research, he recalculates self-evident truths in race topics based on the four models of ethnic relations: hierarchy, assimilation, pluralism, and separatism and found out that among the models cultural pluralism is the appropriate one. Hierarchy Thomas Jefferson believes that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. This is an opposition to Fredrickson’s reinvented definition of these self-evident rights.

Historical findings postulated that even during the period of Renaissance and Reformation, Europeans already distinguished human race into superior and inferior classifications (Fredrickson, White Supremacy 8). Even Aristotle himself explained that certain groups of people are bound to be “natural slaves” as in the conquest of the Spaniards to Indian territories (Fredrickson, White Supremacy 9). Aside from Indians, Asians were also viewed as unfit to be part of the civilized society of the U.S. wherein there is a grant of equal rights and protection (Fredrickson, The Black Image 634). . However, that is not the case in many instances when a dictator became an icon for annihilation and wiped away thousands of people because of radical ideologies.

That happened during the Nazis when Jews were wiped out at the time of Adolf Hitler. Therefore, Fredrickson viewed self-evident truths based on real scenarios, wherein there is hierarchical structure: a classification of powerful and weak races. Assimilation Assimilation of the minority group to the dominant group was a characteristic of Fredrickson’s racial concepts. This concept enables the alteration of the minority’s culture to that of the majority. In essence, it is called “cultural genocide” because it aims to influence or eradicate Native Americans’ way of life (Fredrickson, The Black Image 636) while completely abandoning their own that is observed by the dominant culture as barbaric and uncivilized.

Jefferson believes that people have unalienable rights: the right to life, liberty, happiness, among other things. Yet, in Fredrickson’s views, certain submissive races are bound to assimilate with the majority, simply because they are weak and have no territorial power over a country such as the United States. Liberty is hard to achieve, evident during the period of slavery, up until the discrimination towards African-Americans in modern times. In the history of the African-American civilization, slavery as a form of gradual assimilation, proves to be oppressive and futile because it took from them their own race and ideology.

Establishment of Black community was one way of establishing a “singularity of national formation” (Glaude 79). Pluralism Cultural pluralism means that a culture has its own distinct identity, and that allowing it to exist with other cultures is