This year, I took English 1110.02. For this class, we needed to complete an analytical research paper throughout the course of the semester. The theme of this paper was fear, and it needed to be seven to eight pages in length. My paper was titled “Fear and Bigotry in United States History,” and examined different types and bigotry in our country’s history and explained how they all could be traced back to the emotion of fear.
The three forms of bigotry that I focused on were racism, sexism, and Islamophobia. For each of these, I researched the psychological reasons behind why people held these intolerances against others and found that fear was a common variable. I then gave a brief summary of each one in the United States, followed by a connection to their prevalence today.