Race is a social construct. A social construct is a social category used to group people by certain traits: class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. In The House I Live In, a documentary on the War on Drugs, race determines whether or not a person ends up in jail. In Fruitvale Station, race determines whether or not a person gets to live. In The Freedom Writers, race determines a person’s educational opportunities. Race was created as a means of separating and segregating. Race is a weapon. The House I Live In, a documentary focused on the War on Drugs, describes how race is used to determine who goes to prison and who doesn’t. In the interview with historian, Richard L. Miller, he described what he calls the “chain of destruction”: identification, …show more content…
Oscar Grant, a boyfriend and a father, was brutally murdered on January 1st, 2009. He was spending New Year’s Eve with his girlfriend and eight friends. When the train is stopped at Fruitvale Station, a fight begins between Oscar and an old rival, forcing the transit driver to call the police. When the police arrive, only a couple of the friends and Oscar’s girlfriend manage to make it back down onto the street before the police arrive. When the police do arrive, Oscar is already off the train. In an effort to avoid being arrested, he runs back onto the train and tries to blend in. One officer notices him on the train and decides that he has to be part of the problem. The officer pulls Oscar off the transit and handcuffs him, forcing him onto the ground along with the remaining few of his …show more content…
Throughout most of the movie, one teacher struggles against a schools administrators and teachers in order to teach her own students the power of education. While the administration has no faith in her students (all considered minorities) or her, she is determined to break the racial barrier the school has so willing put up. With life changing ideas and great motivation, she begins to change the lives of each and every one of her students. However, before she succeeded, she often failed. Administration denied the students more difficult reading material in order to ensure that they wouldn’t progress past a fifth grade reading level; deprived of educational opportunities because of race, deprived of a basic human right because of
While at Rutgers, Oscar thought he had something going with a girl named Jenni Muñuz. They became pretty good friends, getting into deep conversations and telling each other secrets. Oscar only imagined the relationship developing into Jenni becoming his girlfriend. The Fuku had to be getting the best of Oscar at this point, as Jenni found another guy that she made her boyfriend. Again, Oscar was more than crushed. His heart had cracked into a million pieces, glued back together and the shattered again. Oscar was in such bad shape after Jenni found a boyfriend that he decided to commit suicide. Luckily for Oscar, he survived his jump from the bridge as he landed safely on the median. Oscar makes it through college and finds a nice job teaching at his old high school in New Jersey. It is not until a much needed trip to the Dominican Republic where his attitude starts to change.
This shows Oscar using Campbell as a resource and considering if he would receive enough money worth helping the teenagers escape. Both Oscar and Campbell lie in order to satisfy
Also race, as a social construct, is a group of people who share similar and distinct physical characteristics. Such as bigger/smaller noses, head, lips or other varies body parts. The social construction of human beings can be made out on a human taxonomy that define essential types of individuals based on certain traits that they have in that region.
The purpose of this study is to expose the process of mass incarceration of poor black males, and females increasingly, within the context of a fabricated war on drugs which really is serving to keep the prison population booming by exploiting traditionally disadvantaged minorities in society. Alexander rightfully calls this a ?redesign? of the old racial caste system in America which was supposed to have been destroyed by the civil rights movement. The war on drugs in the 80s merely became the newest vehicle by which to exploit the black community in this country. The War on Drugs is really the rationale for racial control, which targets black men and women and relegates millions of citizens to what Alexander calls a ?second class status (Alexander, 2012).?
Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, explained how our treatment of criminals has created a new racial caste system, and the only way to make change is by massive social change and Civil Rights movement. The criminal laws often focus on psychoactive drugs used by the minority populations. Minorities are disproportionately targeted, arrested, and punished for drug offenses. For instance, Black, Latino, Native American, and many Asian were portrayed as violent, traffickers of drugs and a danger to society. Surveillance was focused on communities of color, also immigrants, the unemployed, the undereducated, and the homeless, who continue to be the main targets of law enforcement efforts to fight the war on drugs. Although African Americans comprise only 12.2 percent of the population and 13 percent of drug users, they make up 38 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 59 percent of those convicted of drug offenses causing critics to call the war on drugs the “New Jim Crow”(drug policy). The drug
Humans define race by how they conceive and categorize different social realities. Thus, race is often referred to as a social construct. The differences in skin color and facial characteristics have led most of society to classify humans into groups instead of individuals. These constructs affect us all, and they often result in situations where majority racial groups cause undue suffering to those that are part of the minority. The understanding of race as a social construct is best illustrated by the examination of racial issues within our own culture, specifically those that have plagued the history of the United States.
The “War on Drugs” established that the impact of incarceration would be used as a weapon to combat the illegal drug problem in this country. Unfortunately, this war against drugs has fallen disproportionately on black Americans. “Blacks constitute 62.6% of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons in 1996, whereas whites constituted 36.7%. The drug offender admissions rate for black men ranges from 60 to an astonishing 1,146 per 100,000 black men. In contrast, the white rate begins at 6 and rises no higher than 139 per 100,000 white men. Drug offenses accounted for nearly two out of five of all black admissions to state prisons (Human Rights Watch, 2000).” The disproportionate rates at which black drug offenders are sent to prison originate in racially disproportionate rates of arrest.
The author, Michael Alexander an advocate, a legal scholar and a renowned civil rights lawyer has dedicated her career fighting racial injustice, especially in the American Criminal Justice system. The main argument of her book is therefore based on the fact that the racism infects every stage of the criminal prosecution system in a bid to influence the understanding of the public regarding the war on drugs and its effect on the entire nation. The book thus argues that the war on drugs and mass incarcerations are a representation of the previous racialized social control forms such as Jim Crow and slavery. The author thus claimed that there more blacks under the control of the criminal justice system currently than the number of African Americans who were enslaved in 1860. The
The permanence of one’s social exile is often the hardest to swallow. For many it seems unconceivable that for a minor offense, you can be subjected to discrimination, scorn, and exclusion for the rest of your life. When someone is convicted of crime today, their debt to society is never paid. The cruel hand that Frederick Douglas spoke of more than 150 years ago has appeared once again. In every state across our nation, African Americans, particularly in the poorest neighborhoods, are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods. When the War on Drugs gained full steam in the mid-1980’s, prison admissions for African Americans skyrocketed , nearly quadrupling
“The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of its prisoners. The cost of housing all those inmates: $80 billion a year” (Whitaker, 2016). The United States (U.S.) has been fighting an unwinnable war for the past thirty years. The U.S. government and the War on Drugs has disproportionately impacted African Americans and the prison population has quadrupled over the last thirty years. The U.S Government polices of the war on drugs have contributed to the mass incarceration of African American males due to sentencing and race disparities, over-policing, and anti-drug policies.
Who does the Housework? This article shows that Women do the vast majority of housework and men work in out in the real world. The five concepts that I found that relate to the chapters we have discussed thus far include; Dominant group, gender, gender roles, patriarchy, and Equalism. Males are the dominant group in our society not allowing the women often times to get out in the world and work. In this article, women were only getting jobs outside the home when the families started owning bigger houses. This gave them less time to spend doing childcare and housework. Fathers were still not motivated to help even when mothers went back to work. Gender refers to the expected behaviors that your culture assigns to each sex. As this article
Michelle Alexander talks about racial justice and mass incarceration in The New Jim Crow. There is such a high rate of incarceration in the United States. The drug war today is doomed to fail, especially because drugs dealers will replace one another. This war consists of drug related crimes and violence. Suspects of drug wars are racially discriminated by law enforcement officials. Most dealers and users are white. Three out of four of imprisoners for drug offenders are Latino or African American. Police subject the poor and look into ghettos for drugs. In the 1980s, police officers focused on white crack users rather than black, later shifted its attention and gave everyone
Omi and Winant’s discussion from “Racial Formations” are generally about race being a social construct and is also demonstrated in the viewing of Race - The power of an illusion. Omi and Winant have both agreed that race is socially constructed in society. Ultimately this means that race is seen differently in different societies and different cultures. Media, politics, school, economy and family helps alter society’s structure of race. In the viewing , also media as well as history seemed to create race by showing how social norms have evolved in different racial groups.
In today’s modern world, many people would be surprised to find out that there is still a racial caste system in America. After witnessing the election of a black president, people have started believing that America has entered a post-racial society. This is both a patently false and dangerous mindset. The segregation and stigma of race is still very much alive in our society. Instead of a formalized institution such as slavery or Jim Crow, America has found a new way to continue the marginalization of blacks by using the criminal justice system. In Michelle Alexander’s book “ The New Jim Crow”, she shows how America’s “ War on Drugs “ has become a tool of racial segregation and how the discretionary enforcement of drug laws has
Everything begins when Oscar at the age of seven his mother finds him crying for a girl and his mother tells him to be respected by women, before this event Oscar was seen in the community as a small playboy Dominican Rubirosa, he has a relationship with two girls at the same time for a week, a week before the girls ask him to have to choose which of the two is going to stay and then the two left him.it can be said that from that moment everything began.