Abstract
All across the world, the United States of America is often considered through myths, symbols and simplifications. The bubbles of their Coca-Cola, the strength of their athletes, the height of their skyscrapers or the lively melodies of their pop stars would be, in many people's mind, enough to put in a nutshell America. Similarly, people regularly caricature the US with a less glorious image, racism. As a matter of fact, the United States is regularly denounced as the country of the KKK, the miserable black ghettos or the so-called hopeless racist Deep South. On the contrary, other people believe that America has entered in a post-racial era, notably with the election of the first Black president Barack Obama. To their mind, the Americans may have finally solved their problem of racism. But, the two opposite points of view about racism in America are both distorted and oversimplified. The state of racism today is way much complex and ambiguous. This is why the topic of this paper will be about prejudices and clichés about 'racist America', to try to find out how racism today, looks like in the US. In the debate about the link between racism and the United States, there is at least one consensus i.e, racism is deeply rooted in the past of the country. Racist ideology is indeed present in America since the very beginning, and it has haunted the whole history of the country. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, on the 4th of July 1776, it was said that 'all men [were] created equal'.
