I believe that too often in modern dialogue, the word “race” refers to skin color. The Oxford dictionary defines the term “race” as: a group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group. Based on the actual definition of the term, racism has existed in humankind as well as animal kind throughout all of history. Conflicts between any countries, states, or even groups of people is, by definition, racist; “These people are not like us in this or that way and that might hurt our way of life”. This is a natural, animalistic self-defense mechanism that humans have because we are animals and have survival instincts predicated on sticking with your own kind. Granted, this statement is completely lacking in context of any sort (and my personal belief is that we are all humans and therefore should all be working together for our collective benefit), it is an over-arching explanation of human conflict throughout history. Humans also have a tendency to categorize everything for the sake of understanding and using collected data. Of course, this way of thinking has led to many atrocities across time, but it has also led to many successes. I can speak on this topic almost endlessly, but the point I want to make is that “race” is not equivalent to skin color, and I believe that the current national discussion of “race” is leading to the imminent destruction of our American society. Flawed as it may be, our country was built on the best foundation in the history of human civilization, allowing for self-correction over time, and the complete overhaul of our system of government is not the best course of action, but it seems inevitable due to a lack of real dialogue and the constant interference of a biased, far-reaching media presence in our daily lives.
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Interesting thoughts here, but you want to avoid the random google and dictionary definitions (in most classes I imagine, but definitely in this one!) as the words we use have specific meanings and histories of meaning. For example, if you look up realism in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries (you didn’t include the name of the actual dictionary you used, that I could find- you can send me the link to your dictionary if you like), you’ll find lots of general use definitions (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/realism?q=realism) but nothing very useful for our class, which refers to the school of IR theory as we have read and discussed it.