Paulina Clemente
Dr. O’Toole
SOA-110-P1
11/14/17 Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear Between Blacks & Whites by Harlon Dalton is a book written to help the reader look sociologically at the realities of society when dealing with race. It highlights the superiority that white folk have in society compared to blacks, or other people of color, and how it’s important to acknowledge this in order to talk about and heal the racial wounds of America. Dalton gives suggestions for both whites and blacks alike to improve the social situations in society while also being able to adjust how blacks continue on with their lives by keeping in mind that it’s all right to maintain their culture, and that they should come together as a community to work through …show more content…
societies. On top of whites fearing of making mistakes or insulting black people—perhaps because they cannot relate to the struggles that blacks face that whites themselves don’t—Dalton makes a point that white folk don’t think that having conversations about race and privilege matter because they personally didn’t “cause” any problems that black people, or people of color in general, face. He goes to explain that racial wounds, no matter the degree that a person experiences it, are everyone’s responsibility and that’s why these are conversations that everyone needs to be having. Horatio Alger Myth, on the other hand, believes that success in society/life has nothing to do with race, class, background, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, etc. Because of this, it maintains the social pecking order by mentally bypassing the role of race in american society which then leads to the trivialization of race or it erases the meaning of race entirely. With this, inequality among races still remains and the whites who believe in this use this as an opportunity to essentially put racism “out of sight, out of mind.” This is extremely detrimental to the healing of societal race wounds because this is a huge reason why conversations are …show more content…
I think the U.S. still has a long way to go before his analysis no longer applies and while as a country we’ve become more open to conversation about race, we can still do better. Dalton’s ideas can be used more generally to discuss healing across the broad spectrum of the social stratification in the U.S. He made a good point with the use of a metaphor: “When we sustain a physical wound… one of the first things we have to do is clean it out and apply an antiseptic” (Dalton 98). What this is saying is that racial wounds should not be left to fester and get ugly but instead should be cleansed, talked about, healed. The social layers of society need to come together and communicate, no matter what the issue is, in order to not let “the wound fester” and get worse over time. This was, in my opinion, one of Dalton’s best contributions in his book, as it promotes racial healing in a simple and doable way so long as white folk can push aside their fears and excuses for preventing conversations between the two races to make for a better
Dr. O’Toole
SOA-110-P1
11/14/17 Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear Between Blacks & Whites by Harlon Dalton is a book written to help the reader look sociologically at the realities of society when dealing with race. It highlights the superiority that white folk have in society compared to blacks, or other people of color, and how it’s important to acknowledge this in order to talk about and heal the racial wounds of America. Dalton gives suggestions for both whites and blacks alike to improve the social situations in society while also being able to adjust how blacks continue on with their lives by keeping in mind that it’s all right to maintain their culture, and that they should come together as a community to work through …show more content…
societies. On top of whites fearing of making mistakes or insulting black people—perhaps because they cannot relate to the struggles that blacks face that whites themselves don’t—Dalton makes a point that white folk don’t think that having conversations about race and privilege matter because they personally didn’t “cause” any problems that black people, or people of color in general, face. He goes to explain that racial wounds, no matter the degree that a person experiences it, are everyone’s responsibility and that’s why these are conversations that everyone needs to be having. Horatio Alger Myth, on the other hand, believes that success in society/life has nothing to do with race, class, background, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, etc. Because of this, it maintains the social pecking order by mentally bypassing the role of race in american society which then leads to the trivialization of race or it erases the meaning of race entirely. With this, inequality among races still remains and the whites who believe in this use this as an opportunity to essentially put racism “out of sight, out of mind.” This is extremely detrimental to the healing of societal race wounds because this is a huge reason why conversations are …show more content…
I think the U.S. still has a long way to go before his analysis no longer applies and while as a country we’ve become more open to conversation about race, we can still do better. Dalton’s ideas can be used more generally to discuss healing across the broad spectrum of the social stratification in the U.S. He made a good point with the use of a metaphor: “When we sustain a physical wound… one of the first things we have to do is clean it out and apply an antiseptic” (Dalton 98). What this is saying is that racial wounds should not be left to fester and get ugly but instead should be cleansed, talked about, healed. The social layers of society need to come together and communicate, no matter what the issue is, in order to not let “the wound fester” and get worse over time. This was, in my opinion, one of Dalton’s best contributions in his book, as it promotes racial healing in a simple and doable way so long as white folk can push aside their fears and excuses for preventing conversations between the two races to make for a better