My proposed area of concentration for my Peace and Justice Studies major is Racial Empowerment and Community Development through Education and Policy. This concentration will focus on ways in which to provide support to minority communities through educational resources and policies. The foundation of my major will be AFR 213 - 01 Race Relations and Racial Inequality. In order to effectively work with disenfranchised and marginalized communities, I must have an adequate understanding of the systems and institutions that perpetuate the underdevelopment of minority communities in America. Thus, Race Relations and Racial Inequality will give me the historical context for why different racial groups live in under-resourced and underdeveloped communities, and how chronic poverty and institutionalized racism perpetuate such conditions.
In addition to the historical foundation of my concentration, I will also use EDUC 215 - 01 Understanding and Improving Schools, to learn how these systemic inequalities are reproduced in the American education system. This course will focus on the nuances of American education; This course considers how education can
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The course, SOC 205 - 01 Modern Families and Social Inequalities: Private Lives and Public Policies, tackles government involvement and social policies that directly impact working class and immigrant families, the groups of people I hope to assist beyond Wellesley with my concentration. This course is particularly important to my proposed concentration because it forges a connection between public policies and personal experiences. In taking this course I can learn to look at the individual experiences and lives of minorities and understand how those individual experiences actually fit into larger narratives of biased social policies and social
The greatest country in the world still has problems evenly distributing education to its youth. The articles I have read for this unit have a common theme regarding our education system. The authors illustrate to the reader about the struggles in America concerning how we obtain and education. Oppression, politics, racism, and socioeconomic status are a few examples of what is wrong with our country and its means of delivering a fair education to all Americans.
Racial and ethnic disparities in mental health care. There are many barriers in people lives such as social determinants that include health, race and ethnicity as well as discrimination from professionals’ clinical encounter. Strategy is to improve health care in general, by improving access to care and improving the quality of care; could help to eliminate health care disparities. The history of American health policy demonstrates clearly what policymakers can, and on occasion do, to initiate new policies, for example, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantee fair treatment for minority. Interest groups such as NAACP and NOW have made equality their central public policy goal at the poll, in the workplace,
Johnson, H. B. (2014). The American dream and the power of wealth: Choosing schools and inheriting inequality in the land of opportunity. Routledge.
As it talks about racial inequality in chapter 10, the definition of racism is the belief that one race is supreme and all others are innately inferior. White people are actually at the top while the others (the minority groups) are at the bottom. Considering that the laws of the USA revolved around white men in the beginning of this country, it’s not surprising to see how little people are not aware that racism still exists. They claim that it’s the 21st century, slavery happened in the past and it should stay in the past where it belongs. No. We’re going to recognize what white people did to African Americans. We are going to see how white supremacy is ugly and not needed.
American society likes to believe that race relations in our country are no longer strained. We do not want to hear about the need for affirmative action or about the growing numbers of white supremacist groups. In order to appease our collective conscious, we put aside the disturbing fact that racism is alive and well in the great U.S.A. It hides in the workplace, it subtly shows its ugly face in the media, and it affects the education of minority students nationwide. In the following excerpts from an interview with a middle class African American male, the reader will find strong evidence that race plays a major role in determining the type and quality of education a student receives.
There are various ways that race has been utilized to rationalize inequality. For instance, the fact that America ultimately created a race. Under those circumstances, American created this ideology which has constructed political and economic goals that favor the Whites. One of the founders of this inequality is Thomas Jefferson who believed that blacks were inferior to the Whites in the endowments of body and mind. There was a belief that Africans were different kinds of people. Additionally, scientific experiments were constructed that allowed scientists to compare human beings’ skulls with one another to prove a racial hierarchy. Furthermore, race has been utilized to shift attention and responsibility away from opposers and toward the
Some people define race as if it is something solid or concrete, but what they don’t see is that it is a “social fabrication”(Mathew Desmond, Mustafa Emibayer,2009;2). Race is based on the difference in physical appearance which is determined, for example, by the most apparent trait; skin color. Inequality emerges when people living, whether on the same sovereign terrain or across continents, are not treated with the same amount of respect and not given the chance to engage their rights in a free and fair manner. Race and inequality are often linked together because of the “issues that began in the 1800s”(NFB;Journey to Justice;2000) such as racial segregation. Over the years issues of race and inequality have
Throughout the history of the country, America has been considered a fairly racist union. From the workplaces to the society, as an Asian, I felt there's a strong barrier between white and black people, although I felt a little bit of racial among us. In this essay, I will talk about the major racial issue of this country through out my experiences.
The service users, who are black ethnic minority, are undergoing one of the great health inequalities as well as the large cuts in the budget social service since the Second World War, together the reduction in public expenditures by the government (The Guardian, 2015). In England, a variety of disadvantaged society is widely scattered, showing a few signs of narrowing in socio, economic, and ethnic inequalities in their living standard (Hill, 2009). There has been the association between inequity and disadvantages among a group of ethnic minority, who have low social class and limitation to assess to social services. This obvious disadvantage and inequality hint higher demand and care for social and medical supports. Most members in that particular black minority group always lack for enough social service provision from the British government.
In today’s world, the American still has barriers to overcome in the matter of racial equality. Whether it is being passed over for a promotion at the job or being underpaid, some people have to deal with unfair practice that would prevent someone of color or the opposite sex from having equal opportunity at the job. In 2004, Dukes vs. Wal-Mart Stores Incorporation was a civil rights class-action suite that ruled in favor of the women who worked and did not received promotions, pay and certain job assignments. This proves that some corporations ignore the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which protects workers from discrimination based on sex, race, religion or national origin.
Throughout America’s past, racial inequality has been a reoccurring theme in our society. Ever since the Europeans invaded America the white man has been superior compared to all ethnicities. No more than two hundred years ago, African Americans were slaves and only counted as three fifths of a person. Within the past hundred years African Americans have managed to obtain more equality in some situations, but in other cases racial inequality has become worse than it was when segregation took place. The gaps between the quality of education of white and black students receive appears to be growing instead of shrinking. The lack of quality education blacks receive has contributed to significant health differences between
The 21-st century is characterized by the continuous economic downfall. The relationship between race, class and gender should be evaluated to identify the life chances of people to improve their relative position in our socially stratified world. The increased rates of unemployment, homelessness and poverty show that our society requires implementing a transformative approach to reduce social stratification. The term social stratification is applied to identify and asses different forms of inequality that exist in the US society. Patricia H Collins suggests, “while a piece of the oppressor may be planted deep within each of us, we each have the choice of accepting that piece or challenging it as part of the 'true focus of revolutionary change'” (p. 680). Inequality has become a universal feature of our society; therefore, it exists everywhere and concerns race, class, and gender as the key categories of society.
a pen because it was safer than a gun. This was a valuable lesson I've
Since the dawning of racism, human beings have passed judgment on each other based on race and ethnicity. The views of people based on their skin color, place of origin, or their cultural background have caused a stratification of men and women. We now have majority and minority groups, hate groups, ethnic enclaves, segregation, income differences, and have even experienced mass genocide in our world (Carl, 2011). All of these are direct effects of a persons race or ethnicity. These all provide humans with a struggle between each other for various resources. Race and ethnic stratification is an integral example of conflict theory because a competition for resources takes place between people coming from different
For centuries and even today, gender inequality and racial prejudice continue to exist. Throughout time these concepts have overlapped and intertwined, each other creating complex interactions and a negative influence upon society. In the 1980s, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw through her article, named Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, introduced the term “Intersectionality.” Intersectionality, is the theory of how different types of discriminations interact thus, goes hand in hand with Judith Butler, in her article titled “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” which expresses the term “gender acts” and helps decipher a probable cause of the many discriminations faced in contemporary society. Since both gender inequality and racial inequality share a common thread, I believe that what intersectionality represents will help understand Judith Butler’s view on gender classification and the dynamic it’s caused on our social and political formation.