Ossian H. Sweet Case Analysis

In Chapter 1, Alexander provides a brief history of race and racism in America. For those readers less familiar with the narrative of American history, this tour through slavery, Bacon’s Rebellion, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Populism, the end of Jim Crow through Board, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is very instructive. Even if this narrative sounds familiar though, what comes next is probably less so. The backlash to the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the Southern Strategy and the first construction of stereotypes such as lazy “welfare cheats” and black criminals. “Law and order” rhetoric became a popular way to stoke hostility towards blacks; it was carried out by conservatives to win votes among poor whites.

Historically, the United State is not a color-blinded nation. Racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination have powerfully shaped American history from its beginnings. During the World War II, a complex moment in American history, racism powered by the war tremendously influenced the lives of minority groups, race relations, and institutional system. As one of the greatest black American writers, Chester Himes, in his novel “If He Hollers Let Him Go,” reveals how American society in wartime uses patriotism as an excuse to rationalize white racism and enforce power to oppress minorities through criminalizing them and depriving them of their labor opportunities and social opportunities in order to prevent them from moving upward. In this

Black Corona and the article White Spatial Imagination both touch upon how real estates agents favored lending and financing white families because black communities were a ‘poor lending risk’. Another tactic that the white community often use was violence, because they viewed the idea of black homeowners as a target on their own financial stability, as it would lead to property value decrease, they employed violent tactics in order to ensure the physical separation of the black bodies and to showcase Black people inferiority. Although they were no longer slaves they were treated terribly to the point where they were constantly being segregated because of the melanin of their skin.when the whites moved the factories out of the cities and whites

With all that has been examined, it is somewhat troubling to see that 21st century America today is very similar to America from the 1960’s. While it is true that Black Americans have gained civil rights and liberties, it is the current state of American society itself—as well as white fright—that dismisses these rights. The most infamous example of this is, of course, police shootings. Since the Trayvon Martin case, the United States seems to have exploded with more police shootings in which white police officers shoot unarmed black men. According to Mapping Police Violence, “Police killed at least 102 unarmed black people in 2015, nearly twice each week” (Police Violence). Indeed, America is now like the 1950’s because while Black Americans are now free to vote, walk in public, and partake in public programs of U.S. society, certain institutions still attempt to suppress their rights. This attempting at suppression of Black civil rights, moreover, can be attributed to white fright.

During the 1920’s, the black population started to grow very fast in Detroit. In the second year of the Great Depression, blacks and other European immigrants were in deep competition for jobs. As a result, blacks’ feelings towards whites became more bitter. It didn’t matter if it were the immigrants that they were in competition with or even to the police to that matter. Blacks just became more resentful toward white people, in Detroit. Another contributing factor to the conflict between blacks and whites was

Richard Wright is an African American writer who grow up during the 1900s to 1920s when Jim Crow laws and racial segregation were rampaging through the entire South. Wright had faced and witnessed many unjust, cruel incidents and scenes throughout his youth, for instance: frequent violence against black people in which the police didn’t care; getting disparaged by white comrades; being attacked by hunger because the white offered them a tiny amount of food. However, Wright learned the way to survive by putting down his dignity and pride when dealing with white people, and being humble and submissive. Today, in this post-racialism society, racist incidents happen far less than before. Nonetheless, there are still some major obstacles hindering

The news shocked the nation since the struggles of race have been brought up several times among the year. People around the nation mourned the deaths after the tragedy happened. At the same time, similar issues happen repeatedly lead people to self-examine. No matter the massacre occurred in Charleston, the police shooting in Cleveland or Boston, all of these facts lead us to a same destination: the conflicts between the people in different skin tone. Although 52 years from the date of the speech delivered have passed, these issues are still there. Moreover, they even go further on an unexpected path.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s failed housing campaign and the Bronzeville Project exhibit this disjointedness through black middle class Chicagoans ignoring the socioeconomic class divisions within Bronzeville by using institutionalized racial barriers as a conduit to produce a narrative of collective discriminatory practices faced by all blacks preventing social and financial equity for the race. However, these

Prior to 1900, African Americans were dispersed throughout white neighborhoods. Even as servants and laborers in southern cities, African Americans lived side by side with their employers. Even those living in northern cities were more likely to share neighborhoods with whites rather than in racially segregated communities. Although discrimination persisted following the American Civil War, African Americans living in the North regularly interacted with whites in a common social world, shared cultural traits, and values via personal and consistent interactions. However, as African Americans migrated north into industrial communities following both World Wars, the manifestation of the urban ghettos began to develop. In the early 1900’s we begin to see public housing programs, public improvement projects, redevelopment projects, urban renewal policies, and other factors being utilized to attain racial segregation within communities. With the rise of black populations in inner cities, manufacturing jobs were lured away with cheap land and low taxes. As industry funneled out of the cities and into the suburbs, the creation of all-white suburban communities took form. Thus, life was granted to segregationist zoning ordinances, marrying the division of city streets by race as well as racially restrictive agreements amongst private individuals.

Conyers’ bill, H.R. 40, is a proposal to form a commission to study slavery and the subsequent racial and economic discrimination against against African-Americans and to offer up a plan for an apology and reparations that he has introduced in every session of Congress since 1989 (Conyers). In H.R. 40, Conyers brings up his findings that following the abolition of slavery, the government continued to allow practices that put black people at a disadvantage including Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws, which were named after a popular black character in racist minstrel shows, affected states across the nation from the 1880s into the 1960s. Laws that fell under Jim Crow include the 1911 Nebraska one that voided interracial marriages between whites and people of African, Chinese, or Japanese descent and many states had “separate but equal” policies following the ruling in the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson that determined that racially separate facilities were constitutional if maintained equally (Segregated America). Unfortunately, black Americans were not actually seen as equal, especially when it came to housing opportunities. In fact, Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at NYU, conducted a study of children born from 1955-1970 and found that 4 percent of white people had been raised in poor neighborhoods compared to 62 percent of black people (Coates). This is no coincidence seeing as black people were essentially forced into the ghettos that we see today as a result of slavery and Jim Crow. In his essay “The Case for Reparations”, national correspondent for The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates sheds light on just how unfairly black people were treated in housing markets. Coates tells the story of housing practices in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood where realtors practiced “on contract” selling methods with African-Americans in the 1930s-1960s. To

The whites in the deep south were known as the most racist people in all of the United States. In Birmingham, the most racist city in the United States, blacks wouldn’t even make eye contact with whites because of how racist they were. In August of 1955, a young boy by the name of Emmett Till was visiting family in Money, Mississippi. His mother forewarned him about the difference in race issues in the south versus the discrimination that had partaken

Over the years, race and segregation in America have mattered. From my perspective, it is considered one of the most concern sociological topics as it plays a great deal among our society. Garner and Hancock discussed how Wilson pulled threads of theory and research together so to inform with reader that racism, segregation, as well as joblessness had formed a cruel looking-glass for the urban poor. Not to mention Wilson’s looking-glass; it showed us “the mirrored self within the big historical and global framework of racism and capitalism” (2014:208). Wilson (1996) described how work literally had vanished in the communities from the 1960s to the 1970s; thousands of black people, especially black men, suddenly found themselves jobless. Furthermore, Wilson examined the economic forces were the primary social structural variables, including institutional racism against African American people by using the empirical evidence; and that brought the underclass into existence. According to Wilson, the discriminatory federal housing policies trapped the black people in the inner cities; in other words, they got to move and live

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

A myriad of ironies, comical and grave, abounded, as Mel had first come to nationwide prominence among sociologists, urban organizers, civil-rights activists, and liberal politicians with the 1959 publication of his groundbreaking sociological study “Desegregation: Resistance and Readiness,” and then, in 1967, with “Social Stratification: The Forms and Functions of Inequality,” which soon became a standard sociological text. Moreover, before coming to Princeton, he had been director of the Mayor’s Commission on Race Relations, in Detroit. Upon his death, in 1995, the headline above his New York Times obituary read “MELVIN M. TUMIN, 75, SPECIALIST IN RACE RELATIONS.”

The stereotypical ideology set by the society is represented by people in the past in American history. On one consideration to tackle when thinking about racism is the fact that it was a different time - not a better time, but a time when people from other races had no voice. Within past decades, there have been several cases in American judicial system that undisputedly point to law enforcement making decisions based solely on the skin color. Eudora Welty exposes the traces of racism and discrimination