Members Of The Club : Reflections On Life As A Racially Polarized World By Lawrence Otis Graham

W.E.B. Du Bois has contributed greatly to contemporary sociological thinking because he began a conversation of what it means to be “other” in this American Society. In his conversation of what it means to be other he constructed and included three major concepts that continue to resonate till this day. His concepts include “the color-line”, “the veil”, and the “double consciousness” (Appelrouth and Edles, 269). Together, these concepts not only described past experiences of blacks in American society (e.g., slavery) but also continue to remind us that the relation of whites and people of color remains complex. In Du Bois’s own words, “the Nation has not yet found peace from its sins” (273).

A sentence from someone may mean one thing, but an action can have a million different meanings behind it so which one would you judge a person from? Many people experience fear and are scared to face them, so instead of standing up against it they just decide to be a new person. Their minds are manipulated to not face their anxiety and are frightened about what will happen to them. People think that being fearful of something and to overcome it is a difficult task. People often mistaken their strength to fight their fear and decide to give up. Both stories, “Quicksand” and “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” share the common theme of how they use fear as an excuse to escape to a new world, they become a different person and get rid of

During the mid-twentieth century African Americans were at the lowermost tier of society's hierarchy. However within the black race, there was a further social division between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned African Americans. A black individual with more Caucasian features signified high status and beauty which was sought after by members of the African American community (Dibleck). In Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the author uses Janie Crawford to depict how colorism affected African Americans on both sides of the skin color spectrum. By demonstrating the attitude society (mostly men) had towards skin color, the author displays the realities of being an African American in the early 1900s and the deep

There can be many causes of violence that affect a person or a group of people to carry out acts of violence targeting specific people or a specific institution. There are dozens of potential triggers. The main one to focus on is violence in the media. The media is able to portray violence all day long thanks to social media, 24-hour news channel, newspapers, radio broadcasts etc. It is easier for the media to use these various outlets to broadcast violence because we are always plugged in via our phones, tablets, laptops, computers etc. It is often said that the United States of America was conceived and nurtured by violence. Americans not only engage in violence; they are entertained by it.

There is an extricable relationship between race, capitalism, and property and how it perpetuates the notion of whiteness through the exploitation of “others”. Property is a relationship of a person and an object; slaves were considered as objects. Race is constructed from white workers’ ideology of whiteness and labor wage. Racism has been long constructed through the production of race and its relations to property, and we can see it through the notion of capitalism and the idea of whiteness.

Today, racist sororities and fraternities on college campuses have grown to be a public crisis. Recently at the University of Oklahoma, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity released a video including racial slurs and lynching of African Americans (Glionna et al.). This activity shows that there is racism among Americans even in the twenty-first century. There are many other publicized cases involving racism in American society which proves that racism is not just an issue of the past. The past contains elements of racial misconduct that can be explained by James Baldwin and Brent Staples. Baldwin, a preacher and published writer, writes “Notes of a Native Son” to emphasize his experiences and actions towards racism of a different time (50-71). Staples, a reporter and columnist who wrote “Just Walk on By: Black Men in Public Spaces”, describes difficulties and stereotypes from the nation and how he suffered through, yet, another difficult time in American history (394-97). Both have a way with words in describing past racial issues. But in comparison of Baldwin and Staples, one can see that the type of racism they experience, their age and maturity, and their response to racism differ entirely by noting the different time eras of racism that each encounters.

We as humans are the same, yet we have created this concept on how our looks and backgrounds makes us different. This idea of race is what separates us and throughout history has been an issue, but in times of tribulation, people look past this xenophobic ideology especially when they are determined to great lengths to find an explanation for a terrible tragedy.

Winthrop D. Jordan author of White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812, expresses two main arguments in explaining why Slavery became an institution. He also focuses attention on the initial discovery of Africans by English. How theories on why Africans had darker complexions and on the peculiarly savage behavior they exhibited. Through out the first two chapters Jordan supports his opinions, with both facts and assumptions. Jordan goes to great length in explaining how the English and early colonialist over centuries stripped the humanity from a people in order to enslave them and justify their actions in doing so. His focus is

How would feel if your life was filled with hate and discrimination? Racism has been around since almost the beginning of the agricultural revolution and persists through the centuries and will possibly continue through the years to come. We believe that racism is never socially acceptable no matter where in the world you because of how it shows the ignorance that years of hard work tried to overturn.

After the Civil Rights Movement the issues of segregation should have slowly diminished, but still over decades after that significant event people are being placed and given discriminating opportunities throughout the country based on their race. Trying to gain perspective of the situation, blacks and minorities are given opportunities based solely on where they live. Blacks are being placed by the government in environments that are grimy and cheap to manage, while whites are geographically placed in neighborhoods with beneficial factors. In John Powell’s “Race, Place, and Opportunity” he uses logos and ethos to demonstrate racial geographic living conditions and the effects it has on the minorities’ circumstances.

Black and white lives required reshaping and reordering after the Civil War. The problems caused by the Civil War left white and black people in a social void where political and social identities would need to be redefined. The Federal Government was not capable of defining or implementing policies that would aide in the resocialization of elite whites, poor whites, and freed blacks. The Civil War caused shock, trauma and uncertainty. Ex-slaves had to define who they were in relationship to each other, whites and freedom. The future of ex-slaves “uncertain and undefined by law” (Dr. Prior) created social friction between plantation elites, and disenfranchised whites. Ex-slaves were called freedman. The ex-slaves would have to define who they were in newly acquired social space. Being free meant disrupting the social order. Ex-slaves took it upon themselves to define who they would become in public and private spaces. Reordering their lives and refashioning their identities would not come without consequences. Plantation elites who experienced the blunt of the war found themselves stripped of their roles as masters of their domain, family and slaves. Disenfranchised whites without land, power and wealth seized what opportunities they could to elevate their status in a society turned upside down. The Federal Supreme court decision in 1857 Dred Scott (Lecture 15, Slide12) case ruled that Negros were without rights and property. This ruling allowed slavery into

Socialization is indiscriminate and thus racial socialization is indiscriminate in its effects as well. It is tempting for whites to define their initial experience with racial socialization as their first experience with “racial others” (Wise, 9). This though misses a subtle but vital characteristics of socialization namely that one need not experience the racial other in order to reap the benefits of afforded privileges by nature of being white. This distinction though is one that is consistently overlooked and I have admittedly ignored in my own racial naïvety. The inability to clearly assess racial socialization when one is a member of the privileged subculture though should not be resigned to accident or coincidence. It rather represents how socialization and the values and norms it seeks to inculcate are not obligated to be cogent. It is in fact the case that the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a

For example, the Jim Crow laws of the Deep South institutionally marginalized African Americans. Critical race scholars recognize that racism is not a random isolated act (Ladson-Billings, 2013). It is so engrained in U.S. society that it seems natural and is often unrecognizable or invisible to most individuals (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Taylor, 1998, 2009). When racism is invisible, individuals believe it no longer exists or that it is connected to a specific “isolated” incident (Lopez, 2003). Racism is described as a normal component in the everyday life for colored people (Taylor, 2009). Thus, critical race scholars are more surprised by racism’s absence than by its presence and believe the theory’s first task is to expose, disrupt, and eliminate racism (Lynn & Parker,

What is racism? According to Marc Aronson, racism is ?a ladder, a ranking from best to worst.?1 Racism is one of the biggest social issues that has existed since the birth of America as a country and still exists today. During the Twentieth century, right before the Civil Rights Movement took place, racism had reached its peak; violent attacks on African Americans became more intense and the

The quest to understand Society is urgent for our well being and important for if we cannot understand the social world, we are more likely to be overwhelmed by it. In America society is stratified into social classes by which society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy, upper, middle and lower class. Social stratification is a trait of society, not simply a reflection of individual differences but achievement based. For that matter, social class is a controversial issue due to the perceptions of people in each class and many argue that social inequality and racism play a vital role in the operation of society. Among the issues, one’s position in the social class hierarchy may impact their health, family life, education, political