definitions – these are categories:
people with a social status in common, but not a group because
they don't all regularly interact with each other.
race is biological traits that have
socially constructed significance. It is a socially
constructed system of imposing categories on a continuum of genetic
traits.
More variation within than between,
traits are inherited independantly (not as part of a white or black
"package").
According to biologists, race does not
exist – there are not human "subspecies", we are all the
same race. There is only Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family,
Genus, Species
race has only been around since the
1800s, caucasoid, negroid, mongoloid categories. Other societys have
different systems of categorization.
Census issue on the race question –
should it be something we self-identify as?
(MORGAN FREEMAN CLIP) 1 min
Now that makes me think of the MLK, Jr.
Quote near the top of p. 312
but then I think, what would have
happened if MLK had simply "not talked" about race?
NOW I just want to point out that
talking/thinking about race does not make you racist.
People simply talk about things we
see, and things that affect us. "Not everything you face can be
changed, but nothing that is not faced can be changed."
In fact, RACE is a SOCIAL ISSUE that
will not go away just because we ignore it. We have to face the
issue head on – the civil rights victories of the past century were
not a result of NOT talking about race.
Pretending to be colorblind is not the
same as creating equality.
Here's someone who pretends to be
colorblind satirically.
COLBERT CLIP
jokes to talk about
"I don't see race"
"I have a Ph.D, am I white? -
relationship to class"
"gets fired up about Scots-Irish
people – historical/religious antagonism"
"White people are the default
color"
"class, Jimmy Buffet records"
-it's about the MEANING of being white
that CULTURE projects on to us...
EXERCISE ON TOP OF p.305 (identify
races of faces)
everyone had 2 parents, 4 (2^2)
grandparents, 8 greats (2^3), and so on
generation = 30 years,
so to find out how many ancestors
you had X generations ago, just take 2^X
so if you go back about 600 years
is about 20 generations, you had approx 1 million ancestors who
contributed to your genetic code. (2^20 = about 1 million)
In 1000 years or 37 generations,
you had approx (2^37) = 100 billion ancestors.
Wikipedia says that there have
been, at most, 106 billion homo sapiens alive on earth EVER
including now. So we all share some ancestors.
increasing mixture, purity is a myth,
but is socially symbolic. SEEING SOCIOLOGY IN THE NEWS –
interracial girls wants to be accepted, but faces the notion that
there is some "authentic" race. Since these categories are
weakening and breaking down, she suffers ANOMIE similar to how men
suffer gender-anomie in the age of industrialization.
Conflation! Two related ideas treated
as the same.
Ethnicity is cultural
Arab/Muslim conflation and terrorism in
the past decade.
minorities, prejudice, stereotypes,
discrimination
pre-judging – before you hear the
evidence!
-denies people their individuality and
value as distinct persons
hispanics and the immigration issue –
Hard Work article on p. 310
how easy should it be to become a
citizen? Statue of liberty quote on p. 317
RACISM on an individual level, is a
belief that some races are innately better than others.
Prejudice – prejudging people, not on
the basis of their character, but on things like color
THEORIES – p. 312-314
THEORIES
-scapegoating, safe targets
-authoritarian personality, rigid
beliefs, moral convictions, society is competition
-culture, part of the culture we all
learn
-conflict, used as a tool by the
powerful to justify exploitation
Is
it getting better? What do you think of what Chris Rock says?
(CHRIS ROCK CLIP) 2 min
(ENDED DAY 1
HERE)
One example –
intelligence – bell curve in the population, explain Intelligence
Quotient
blackboard links!
how much of this
can be traced to CLASS inequality? -links
discrimination
-vicious cycle on p. 314
institutional discrimination, blacks
and the police and CJ system in MILWAUKEE's(Plaisted Writes)
links on racial disparties in
sentencing?
(Now last time I talked about how, if
we stopped talking about race like Morgan Freeman suggested, that
might help reduce INDIVIDUAL PREJUDICIAL ATTITUDES, but that I DIDN'T
think that would solve the bigger systemic issues.
The bigger social problem is STRUCTURAL
RACISM, where this kind of belief and discrimination becomes
institutionalized in society.
Here's an example of what I mean: the
story of our legal history:
1935 – Soc. Security – if you work
you pay into the system, and this guarantees you income after you
retire. BUT the law originally excluded agricultural workers and
domestic servants, who were mostly black, mexican, and asian (and
were least able to save or have pension plans)
1935 Wagner Act – established right
to unionize, but American Federation of Labor fought for the right of
unions to exclude non-whites. So minorities were locked out of
higher-paying union jobs, and denied benefits such as health and job
security. Legally lasted through the 1950's, but it wasn't until
the 70's that many unions really did start admitting minorities.
1930's-'40's: Federal govt. Began
programs to subsidize low-cost loans for millions of working class
americans. Govt. Underwriters used a "national appraisal
system" tying property value and loan eligibility to race –
all white communities got the highest ratings and loans with the best
terms. Minority neighborhoods got low ratings and bad loan terms or
were denies. Less than 2% of these loans went to non-whites. So
minorities were locked out of home ownership.
1948 – US Supreme Court finally
outlawed "Restrictive Covenants" REQUIRING homeowners not
to sell or lease to non-whites. Private developers and real estate
agents could still choose to. Lenders continued to base property
appraisals and loan terms on race (higher fees and interest to cover
the "risk" – THIS SYSTEMATIC DEVALUING OF NONWHITE
NEIGHBORHOODS AND HOMEBUYERS BY MEANS OF FEDERAL INTERVENTION
DISGUISED RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND ENABLED MANY TO CLAIM THAT
SEGREGATION WAS "MARKET DRIVEN"
1949 – National Housing Act. Most
non-whites were renting, and so government stepped in and developed
"Urban Housing Projects", destroying many taxable
properties. So the tax burder was shifted onto fewer and fewer
residents. Encouraged white flight.
1950's-60's: Economic/Housing Boom.
Fed/State subsidies to development of suburbs. Construction of many
freeways connecting residentail areas to business centers in cities,
often right through urban "neighborhoods." Many whites
moved to suburbs. In the 1960's, many businesses began moving to the
suburbs, depriving urban areas of jobs and taking even more taxes out
of the cities.
1968 – Kennedy's Fair Housing Act,
meant to reduce this discrimination, but in practice many appraisers
continued to factor in race, use racial steering and predatory
lending. In 1988 this law was expanded to make it more powerful.
1970's, 80's, 90's – housing prices
rose dramatically, increasing wealth for homeowners who were mostly
white. This also increased the cost of entry into the housing market
for renters.
PBS website on WHITE FLIGHT
Demographic map of Milwaukee from
Census data?
Patterns of interaction
-Pluralism
-Assimilation
-Segregation
-Genocide
specific categories:
native americans were here first
WASPs – Weber's Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism
African-Americans and slavery
Asian-Americans – chinese, japanese,
and the rest
Hispanic/Latin Americans
Arab americans
Ethnic whites (non-english)
SOCIAL DISTANCE SCALE
LOOK UP the
INVISIBLE KNAPSACK of WHITE PRIVELAGE
DREK
Regardless,
while on my journey into Women's Studies I happened upon the famous
article
by Peggy
McIntosh, "White Priviledge: Unpacking
the Invisible Knapsack." The basic contention of this article is
that while we tend to focus on social inequity in terms of the
priviledges denied to low power groups, it's also true that high
power groups actually gain certain priviledges.
RACE – THE
POWER OF AN ILLUSION Video
started at 5:30
-genetics,
athletics, measurements, social differences, interracial marriage,
eugenics, mongrels,
-back to
athletics – jesse owens african american won hitler's olympics.
Prior to that, american race scientists had considered black
physically weaker, frailer, more illness prone, but after that
culture began to concede physical superiority to blacks at the cost
of being civilized (closer to primitive state, where physicality
matters more).
-took one hour!
Part 2- socially
constructive narrative – politics, history, symbolic
interactionism.
As an aside to add on racism, here is a response to a reddit question on why dividing scholarships by race is not racist:
Racism, like sexism, is a term used confusingly to refer to two related but importantly different subjects. The casual usage refers to any incidental act of discrimination. The second, more political usage refers to systems of discrimination that form when prejudice is backed up by (social, cultural, political -- which are all differents ides of the same triangular coin) power.
The second is what we're primarily concerned with. There are always going to be individual arseholes discriminating against this or that, we can't expend our effort on policing every rude interaction. What we care about are oppressive institutions and elements of our culture that are generated an reinforced by our collective social power.
So, for example, if your conspiracy-theorist neighbour thinks that white men are injecting HIV into the world's chicken nuggets, that's a singular instance of discrimination. If popular culture reinforces the idea that black men are inherently violent and stupid, then that's oppressive racism. Your neighbour's a dick but he's not using his social power to reinforce real and serious problems. He's not going to affect anything.
We care about individual instances more when they reinforce existing social problems because everything -- our thinking, our practice, our policy -- ultimately derives from our culture. One of the main methods to solve social problems is to change the culture by restricting and chipping away at the negative reinforcements.
This is why 'nigger' and 'cracker' are not considered the same.
This is something that confuses many people, who initially look at actions as discrete instances and not in a broader social context, or who don't hold that culture has a profound real-world effect.
In your example of scholarships, the individual instance is discrimination, but it's a narrow and temporary discrimination with the intent of eradicating racism as a broader permanent social institution. Certain races in certain countries are trapped in poverty loops; systems of exploitation based on race were imposed on them for centuries. Within the last 50 years, much of the legal barriers to their participation in larger society have been removed -- but does that suddenly make them no longer an underclass? We can use the example of black Americans, since I don't think many non-Australians are very familiar with the example of Aboriginal Australians. Black Americans were initially enslaved. After a few centuries, slavery was abolished, and the slaves turned loose... as illiterate, uneducated, unskilled workers, who were not given adequate education, power, or the rights to live and mix with those parts of society that had those things. So they remained an underclass living in their own neighbourhoods with little opportunity or infrastructure for the next century. Starting 50 years ago, the legal barriers to their participation in larger society were lifted. But did this suddenly make them no longer an underclass? Did the babies born that year grow up to be exactly equal to whites in every way? No, because none of us operate in vaccuums and none of us are born on fresh slates; our environment, our history, and others' engagement with us shapes how we live. Your family grew up under those racist institutions, so they are impoverished and living in a bad area, so you grow up with poor schooling. You don't have access to the resources that people with wealthier histories have, or the social opportunities that people not subject to negative cultural elements have. Your family, struggling, may require you to leave school early and take a job to help. Economic crises will hit you harder. It's just harder for you to live, to study, and to move in the world, because of your background. And if you don't move, then your children are born into the same situation... and it continues forever, because of the history and because of the culture. And because your race remains an underclass, with its own impoverished neighbourhoods and ghettos, social culture's negative attitudes will be reinforced by popular perception, making that another factor you have to try to escape.
So how do you fix this problem? Given that the situation was caused by direct negative power, would it be fair to solve it with direct positive power? Society can discriminate on the individual basis to reduce barriers for members of underclasses. This makes it more likely for them to have social mobility, more likely for them to break the cycle. The positive change in their life directly changes all of their descendants, and their families. It affects their communities, and the combination of these things affects social culture as negative stereotypes are broken and clear divisions are softened. It's an instance of discrimination in a single moment that helps to dissolve discrimination on a permanent basis. The end goal is for it to no longer be necessary; eventually it will be abolished.
It may help to compare it to clearer and more obvious examples. Starting in the 1950s and continuing through to the modern day, especially in areas like India, people have been opening schools specifically for adult women. Why haven't we seen more schools opening for Indian men? The answer should be obvious: the culture has long decreed that men are educated breadwinners who engage with society while women are simple parents and wives who engage with the home, and people are trying to change that. With a superficial glance it seems discriminatory, but it's actually an attempt to end discrimination.
Things that can seem silly when analysed in a vaccuum can make perfect sense when you look closely at their context.
