Race is one of the most pervasive problems in post-World War II America. The movement for gender equality is still ongoing, as is the push for racial equality. The two issues are strongly intertwined, as both racial minorities and women have been systematically oppressed with negative reactions to their attempts at integration. The issue of race, however, is steeped in absolute violence and unrepentant hatred. While the gender gap continually narrows, the racial gap has hardly dissipated. The United States is a nation that was formed by marking the difference. Some often early settlers, the Pilgrims, claimed their rights to the land on the basis that they were more civilized than the natives and therefore had a right to the land. This legacy of oppression has been carried forward through American policy, with the denial of Indians' humanity and right to their land. Michael Herr in Dispatches notes racial tensions, "he might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was always headed, the turnaround point where it would touch down and return to form a containment perimeter " (Herr, 49). Herr compares The Trail of Tears, the expulsion of American Indians from their homelands to settlements, to the Vietnam War because it is the same model of conquest against an enemy for no legitimate reason. The American soldiers did not know who they were fighting and killed many Vietnamese who were not Viet Cong. The enemy was any Vietnamese, just as the Indian nations were all enemies of the United States and needed to be removed so “civilized” people could take over their land. Herr sees the war as another example of the racially charged United States. Jim Crow laws are another example of racial discrimination...... focus of the article...... theory: religious stereotypes and out-grouping of Muslims in the United States”. Islamophobia in America: The anatomy of intolerance. Ed. Carl W. Ernst. Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. Print.Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Knopf, 1977. Print.Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17.2 (1992): 251. Web.Lytle, Mark H. “The Second Civil War.” America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era: From Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Page no. Print.Peek, Lori A. Behind the Backlash: American Muslims after 9/11. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2011. Print.Stop and Frisk in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Journalist Matthew Orr. New York Times, July 11, 2010. Web. May 16 2014. .