Annotated Bibliography: Readings For Diversity And Social Justice

In “Thinking About Diversity”, Frank H. Wu details about his experiences as an Asian American. Wu says that, “some non-Asian students do, indeed, assume that I am gifted with mathematical, scientific, or computer-programming talents solely on account of my race” (Wu, 147), this concept shows the overview picture of Asians, but this does not apply to every Asians. The mathematic, science or computer programming is a universal subject that most industrialized places like Asia teach to students. Most Asian immigrants are familiar with those subjects because they already learn it back home and are able to do well on them, not because of a race. A race cannot provide a special intelligent to people, it’s just a different classify groups of people.

Throughout the past couple of weeks, the readings revolved around oppression. These readings have talked about oppression as being pervasive, restrictive, hierarchical, intentional, unintentional, institutionalized, and so much more. These examples show us how oppression is taking over our society, and it is going to take a lot for it to finally disappear. One way that individuals believe oppression can start to deteriorate is through the process of social justice. The end game of social justice is to make sure there is equality for everyone present in our society today. Yet, we know that having social justice present is a process that will not happen overnight. By breaking down and analyzing oppression, it could help many individuals understand

Marsiglia, F.F.,& Kulis, S. (2015). Diversity, oppression and change (2nd ed.). Lyceum Books, Inc., Chicago, IL.

So the argument runs that we live in a world in which there are deep-seated conflicts between cultures embodying different values. Different peoples and cultures have different values, beliefs and truths, many of which are incommensurate but all of which are valid in their own context. Social justice requires not just that individuals are treated as political equals, but that their cultural beliefs are also treated as equally valid. The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That’s all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff

Something that I connected with was in the Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, was the idea of multiple identities based upon their social location. I liked how the author explained what was social location and the use of the overlapping circles that are specific features of our identity (race,gender,class) and a persons social location is where all those circles meet. I connect this to the classroom by thinking about how each student comes from a different life, experiences, culture, and backgrounds and as a teacher you need to realize and accept each student for who they are and do not try to change them or make them into someone they are not. Each student brings their own set of tools and knowledge to the classroom that enrich your

The Readings for Diversity and Social Justice did an excellent job of discussing the many perspectives and factors that come into play when dealing with the issues of oppression, as did the video Separate and Unequal revealed the ongoing struggle of desegregation of schools across the nation following the Civil Rights movements. But there was a fault that I personally felt prevented the whole story from being told. There was a missing perspective, the opinion of the middle class, and so I present the article below from the New York Times titled, Middle Class Is Disappearing, at Least From Vocabulary of Possible 2016 Contenders.

When we talk about race, what are we really talking about? The issue of race is a complex issue, with socially ambiguous undertones that have plagued our society for decades. Race has been a marker and maker of stereotypes. Race has been used as a justification for injustice. Whether slavery, Japanese internment, or social and economic exclusion, race has given an avenue for those in power to exclude ones deemed ‘other’. In the following paragraphs I will examine the premise of race and try to demonstrate why it is a social construct.

According to Jonathan M. Marks and his dissertation, Scientific and Folk Ideas about Hereditary, Race can be classified as a. “property of [an individual’s] constitution, innate and assigned at birth” (178). On a biological basis, race is perceived as a naturally occurring characteristic which commonly groups certain individuals together and other individuals apart. Now, Marks argues this assumption by critically analyzing the cultural aspect and societal influence that impacts the way Race is perceived and systemized. From an anthropologist view-point, Race is not pre-determined or natural it is culturally constructed and is an unsolidified concept. Essentially, anthropologist see race as a cultural construct because it has the ability to change over time and has no definite meaning. Mark supports this when he

Most individuals think that one person can't make a difference. This generalization is one that Over the course of this paper I will give examples of individuals who made a difference in my life, The United States and even the world to try and eliminate this generalization. I believe that one person can make a difference and influence others to make a difference themselves.

In preparation for this paper I identified the following key themes and my thoughts and feelings related to race. When I first arrived, I was

Races are irreducible to biology and naturalistic understandings can also be regarded as collective social identities forged through processes of racial formation; eliminating ‘race would attempt to erase significant histories of hard-fought struggles (Alcoff, 2001 in Murji and Solomos, 2015:131).

The concept of race has always been a prevalent part of history and has been a driving force in defining and understanding certain time periods. The analysis of race is something that is not always easy to do, but W.E.B. Du Bois and Howard Winant allowed readers to better understand within their articles. Du Bois begins the article by stating the ever changing and developing concept of race. He also gives the idea that race was a way to divide the masses, and this concept is clearly seen throughout several events in history. Because this divide, many would try to distinguish by physical characteristics rather than the personality, morals, and experience that a person could offer. Further into Du Bois’ argument, the

19th century Western literature follows the thought that race is an “ineffaceable quantity, which irresistibly determine the shape and contour of thought and feeling (1892). This is an important precedent of us vs them, and in the “scientific” belief that non-national races were inherently, biologically different, rather than culturally different.

This essay is a review of David Dudgeon’s article “Accept no substitute: biodiversity matters” published in 2014. The outline of the essay is to first introduce Dudgeon’s arguments and then move on to explain his criticisms of our current way of life in Hong Kong. Finally, this essay will critically discuss Dudgeon’s position.

One could say that scholarly debate over the roots of race is a recent phenomenon even though its background stretches back to early anthropologists and sociologists. Franz Boas in his The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) rejects race as a determinant of culture, intelligence, or temperament (5-6). Articulating a concept of “cultural relativism,” Margaret Mead, in the year 1928, built on Boas’ assertions, articulated the idea that one must judge other cultures by their own criteria and not those of the observer’s community (234). Some anthropologists, by the 1940s, even rejected race and racism. Ashley Montagu offered such an argument in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942). According to Anderson, the debate on the origin of slavery was a more recent ancestor of the history of race and emphasizes that “in the past, most scholars had uncritically assumed that both race and slavery had existed from the first contact of white Virginians and unwilling African immigrants. With the latter subjected to reevaluation, it became possible for the former to be questioned as well.” (91) As such, the categories of