A Comparative Analysis of Cox’s and Field’s Explanations on Racial Inequality Root

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211020.313How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Oliver Cromwell Cox, Barbara J. Fields, racism, racial inequality, North America, colonism

Abstract

In fact, the United States has been shrouded in the shadow of racism since its founding. Many American scholars have put forward their own views when they analyze race issues. In this paper, I aim to find the similarities as well as differences in the views of two famous scholars -Oliver Cromwell Cox and Barbara J. Fields- on the same issue of the root cause of racial inequality. Oliver Cox has a unique perspective compared with the academic mainstream at that time; he believed that capitalists or antagonisms lead to the problem with their colonial exploitation in the age of imperialism. As an influential anticipant in the intellectual movement of ‘black Marxism’, he provides researchers with Marxist view and new blood. In addition, Field points out that the element “history” holds a significant influence on the construction of concept of race; thus, the formation of race must be considered with its social and ideological context. Given the distincts between two famous scholars’s standpoints on the root of racial inequality, I decide to build a comparison to explore to what extent they may agree with each other’s point of view, and where their academic differences exist. After comparing the two scholars, I believe they would support that even the most striking physical characteristics do not stand for the concept “race”. The biological differences are not meaningful when we focus on racial issue, although most people will locate it at appearances. And both would agree with taking capitalist power as the important role in racism. Having said that, there is also a difference existing in their views: Cox states that the class conflict between capitalist exploiters and the working class is the most contributing factor while Fields thinks that racism and related concepts are constituted by the dominant group and keep changing under different contexts in the U.S. In other words, history is the most essential factor. In conclusion, I hope that my results will encourage people to re-examine the root causes of racial problems during the special period of the “Freud event” in 2020.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yiran Liu
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/10/21
TI  - A Comparative Analysis of Cox’s and Field’s Explanations on Racial Inequality Root
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Public Relations and Social Sciences (ICPRSS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1100
EP  - 1103
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211020.313
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211020.313
ID  - Liu2021
ER  -