A LEXICO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF RACISM IN RICHARD WRIGHT’S NATIVE SON

Abstract

Racism’s earliest usage has been traced to the 1902 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary as a description of U.S. policy toward Native Americans (Howard, 2016). For the first half of the 20th century, the term was used interchangeably with “racialism.” The term’s use is relatively new in the social sciences (Barot & Bird, 2001) and began with Ruth Benedict’s Race and Racism (Benedict, 1945) and in Edmund Soper’s Racism: A World Issue (Hankins, 1947).