"Post Racial America"

Most people that know me would not hesitate, if asked, to say that I am black. Some try and be politically correct referring to me as African-American, or of African decent, but one thing most if not all of the people that I interact with on a daily basis would agree on is the fact that I am black. That is my "race", that's the box that I check off on any government form that I sign, and that is the basis on which people make assumptions - good or bad - about the type of person I am before I ever get a chance to open my mouth. It wasn't always like this though. I remember growing up in Cameroon and almost never considering that I was a black kid. Then again, I was just a kid, and issues of race didn't really concern me. Nonetheless, I didn't ever consider the fact that the color of my skin could have such an impact on how people interacted with me.

In this unit of class, we learned about the concept of race. We came to learn that race did not exist biologically, but was rather a construct of society. To strip every individual down to their most superficial layer of un-melanated skin, and you would not be able to distinguish between an asian man and a european. We came to learn that in fact, that a 5'2" white man and a 5'2" black man have more in common biologically, then a 5'2" white man and his 6'0" white best friend. Many throughout history have tried to find countless ways of distinguishing races, but modern day science has proven that race does not exist. It is really silly to think that we live our lives as Americans for the most part, operating on something that doesn't exist.

Our social understanding of race is a classification in accordance to skin tone. This in itself is so flawed because no two places on earth have the same organization of race. We use words like black, white, mixed, asian, and hispanic to describe a variety of things. Our classifications are contradictory because you have black and white hispanics. You have children born of dark and fair skin, yet born of the same parents. It is hard to say that race is a set thing because there are so many possibilities. Our American system of race classification seems complicated, but has no match for the system established in Brazil. In Brazil, the order in which you were born is a factor that is taken into consideration when determining your race. This means that in Brazilian culture, race is not limited to the color of your skin. This fact alone means that there isn't a consistent definition of race.

So if race doesn't exist, why do we still use it?

We use race for the same reason it was used in the 1700's. We use race as a means of implicit and explicit racism. We create in-groups and out groups, and judge others based on whether they fall in the in-group or not. America was shaped on prejudice and discrimination - prejudice being the negative attitude that people held against those in the out group, and discrimination being the means by which people act on that prejudice. Given that we all understand the current classifications of race, we simply place people in those categories based on how closely they fit our mental set of a given race. This is simple enough to understand.

America seems to still be in the belief that although slavery, jim crow, and all of the other explicit forms of institutionalized racism that existed have been abolished (de jure), we still live in an America where the aftermath of those laws is still felt (de facto). To claim that we no longer experience racism because we have had a black president would be completely ignorant of the fact that in Florida alone more black people were shot by police than where white (consider that whites outnumber blacks by 3 for every 1white). To claim that the reason for this disparity is a result of blacks "looking for trouble" is ridiculous because in the same study unarmed blacks shot by police outnumber unarmed whites 2:1. This ration caries through with the tendency of blacks to be shot after being pulled over for traffic violations or while being thought to be "reaching for a weapon" but was just reaching for a drivers license. Blacks were even three times as likely to be shot for minor crimes like smoking marijuana or shop lifting. These are a few of the countless statistics that indicate that there is an obvious difference in the way that people are policed based on race. The law is said to be blind, but those that enforce it aren't. These numbers are even further skewed when we look at the treatment of blacks across the nation. This is only looking at the plight of black america. For those who blame black america for their "culture of not wanting to succeed", I haven't even started to discuss the challenges that blacks aspiring to be higher ups in corporations face. All of this comes to show that we do not live in a post racial america.

Blog Post #5

In this section, if class we learned about norms and how those who deviate from societal norms are ridiculed and looked down on. We also looked at cases of how different people who deviate from the same norms are differently based on where they are in the class system. Specifically, we learned that those of the upper class who deviate are generally more accepted by society because of the fact that their class acts as a shield in preventing them from facing the consequences of society. Class can be a shield of consequence in that money can be used to cover up mistakes. Wealthy people often have the money to pay for attorneys that help them win cases when that deviance is brought in question with the law. Those of the upper class are also given the benefit of the doubt more than others because they are presumed to be good and honest people because of the fact that they have a lot of wealth.

One specific instance of how class plays a role in society's treatment of deviance that we looked at was the case of a group of north suburban football players who were caught buying drugs near a CPS high school. These students were buying pills from a 15-year-old boy. The football players were seniors in high school. The boy selling the drugs was sentenced to 15 years in prison while the football players were charged with a misdemeanor that would be removed from their record when they turned 18. The question that we were forced to debate was whether the respective punishments fit the crimes that were committed. On one hand, selling drugs is a legal deviance and rightfully so, but so is buying drugs. Both parties took part in the exchange and neither would exist without the other. Had the football players not sought the drugs, the dealer would not have customers to sell to, and had the dealer not provided the drugs, the football players would not have access to them. Most of the class was pretty decisive on the fact that both parties should have been punished equally. One thing that no one could pose a logical argument against was the fact that the system ruined the life of a young boy trying to fend for himself while letting an equally guilty party go, and the class history of the two parties played a role in the punishments they received.

In this section of class, we also looked at the reading "Saints and Roughnecks". This reading was done by a researcher who followed two groups of high school students across several semesters, observing their social habits and how others perceived them. One group consisted of lower middle-class kids who spent most of their time out of their houses hanging out near grocery stores and in the main town center. These kids were by no means the best dressed and they didn't focus much on how others perceived them. They got into their fair share of trouble specifically fights and petty theft. The other group of kids came from the upper middle class and lived in the nice neighborhood of the town. They were the popular kids that everyone wanted to be or be with. They were well respected in school and within the community. Despite their esteem, these kids were apparently more mischevious than their lower-middle-class counterparts. The only difference between the two groups was that the wealthier kids had cars that allowed them to travel further away from the town they lived in to do the bad things they did. The kids with less money were seen doing the bad things they did by those they lived with and were therefore associated with deviance.