Nella Larsen’s Passing discusses the reunion between two women, Clare and Irene, who can identify as black, but are capable of passing as white. While Clare officially passes as white, Irene only passes when it is convenient for her. Throughout the story, the women’s experiences exemplify the tensions that arise from having a black identity. These women succeed in passing as white illustrating that race is a social construct rather than a reality since they are not constricted to one race.…
The article, “Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege” by Pem Davidson Buck argues about the “psychological wage” that was created by the system of race and white privilege embedded in our society. Buck gave us an overview of what happened before and after Bacon’s Rebellion creating the major changes in our society. Before the rebellion, people love each other, but during and after the rebellion people started to feel that they should have power over others which lead to the creation of white privilege. She mentions construction of race because since there is racism and a difference in skin color, elites want to distance themselves. The elites distance themselves from the poor because they are not at the status and creating “white privilege” would make those who are white feel like they are better…
The movie Do the right thing opens with the song lift every voice which is the anthem for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people (NAACP), this caused me to automatically think of the rational issues being face at the time of this film, the injustice and oppression the African American people have gone through, and seem to still be going through today in the age of freedom and equality. The film then moves on to a young lady dancing to the song “fight the power”, which was a way to tell the African American communities to take a stand. The opening of the film also elutes to the system of unequal power and privilege. Chapter 8 of text has this quote, “In a democracy, the majority of citizens is capable of exercising the…
Europe’s peoples perceived their success as an example of their superiority and their superiority to be exemplified in their success. From this malignant viewpoint, Mills contends the whites elevated themselves into a separate entity whose history was both more important and determinant over the fate of all other peoples considered lesser. If not white, the nonwhite Other is predisposed as inferior and unable to possess moral prowess. It is this blindness of the concept itself that hinders the white cognizer from seeing what is before them. He connects past overt racist behavior into the present day by developing the theory that current efforts to promote “color blindness” refuse to recognize the structures of oppression that allow consequent privileges for white individuals throughout all levels of society and corroborate a fundamental denial of the interconnectedness which the components of knowing and non-knowing depend upon.…
In her essay, Jacqueline Jones explains the ideas of race and gender and states that they are hard to discuss as different categories in historical analysis because they are continuously changing. She says that in past ten or fifteen the racial and gender ideologies were extricated from their biological roots. Author also states that it is easy to find examples of physical appearance irrelevance to definition of race or sex organs irrelevance to definition of gender. Jones gives examples of young girl who appeared to be white but when it was discovered that she had African heritage she was fired from her job. Another example Jones gives are black men in the U.S army who were assigned to perform female service work.…
1. The reading notes that there was a definite tendency toward “Negrophilia” in parts of northern and western Europe in the late Middle Ages, and the common presumption that dark pigmentation inspired instant revulsion of the part of light skinned Europeans is, if not completely false, at least highly misleading (Fredrickson 26). The cult of Prester John and Ethiopia was one of several signs that blacks could be represented in a positive and dignified manner in the late Middle Ages. The reading also explains how it was “wrong” to enslave other Christians, so they went for Africans and had the idea that their souls might be saved through contact with believers. I thought the most interesting thing from this article was how in the past they were tempted to see blackness as a curse signifying that Africans were designated by God himself to be a race of slaves.…
Annotated Bibliography Ahmed, Sarah. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory. 8.2 (2007): 149-68.…
Between the World and Me Book Review Ta-Nehisi Coates, an African-American writer and national correspondent for The Atlantic, published his book Between the World and Me in 2015. Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates a letter writing format and introduce the thesis of this book with an interview. By using his unique writing style, outstanding using of languages, and narrative form, Coates emphasizes a currently serious issue in American, which is the gap between whites and blacks. Ta-Nehisi Coates adopts a letter writing format in the book Between the World and Me to denote the awareness or racism issue. Coates begins his writing with one word “Son”, which indicates the primary audience is his son, Samori. However, Coates intends to notify…
Even in biology, to explain female parts, they had to use that of men as a reference point (Ousdshoorn, 111). Not until the 20th century was a man raping his wife seen as a punishable offence (Ramirez, Feb 23). These acts of oppression continue to grow like a wildfire because of our traditional belief system in the society. Inasmuch as we try to deny it and hide under the shadow of the ‘21st century’, we still have mentalities of our forefathers, which uplift men in anyway possible, and seconds women to men. We see that race is a constant determinant of opportunities and goodwill- who is favoured more in a social, political and economical situation, a white middle class man or an aboriginal…
In her article titled Slavery, Race, and Ideology in America, Barbara Fields asserts that race is a social construction rather than a physical attribute of individuals. In accordance with Fields, injustices have historically arisen when society tries to assign meaning to race. She asserts that dominant groups often use race to assert a presumed biological superiority in order perpetuate social hierarchy and justify oppression. Subsequently, racial meaning is consistently “verified” in social life to the point that it becomes palpable. These ideologies manifest themselves in their inclusion to the law, “which is bound by those rituals that daily create and recreate race in its characteristic American form.…
Sydney McMurray Mrs. Mihalik Honors English 9 1 December 2017 “Fight The Power” Seventy percent of the world’s population is made up of people of ethnicity. Caucasians are a minority when compared to the rest of the world. So why is it that groups of people speak out about “white supremacy”? The color of a person’s skin creates a fantastical division of power.…
In The Racial Contract, Charles Mills expands upon social contract theory, originally proposed by Rousseau, and assesses the role of race (phenotypical, genealogical, or cultural) in its formation and function within society. In doing so, Mills goes on to assert that, “The general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them. All whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it” (Mills, 11). Through this statement, Mills contends that race has always been a central facet of the way western society functions…
In his essay “ Genealogy of Modern Racism” (2002), Cornel West argues that whites have been conditioned to treat blacks inferiorly in beauty, culture and intellectual abilities because of the structures of modern discourse. (P.90) Many writers have mentioned the differences between the blacks and whites but most of them against the idea of the blacks being equal to the whites in any form. Some of the writers are J. J. Winckelmann who portrayed ancient Greece as a world of beautiful bodies. (P.97) Another example is “Winthrop Jordan and Thomas Gossett have shown that there are noteworthy premodern racist viewpoints aimed directly and indirectly at nonwhite, especially black, people.”…
#5 The U.S. Constitution assumes that it is protecting all individuals through its legislative, which historically has not been true. The legal system wants equality between both sexes, yet uses the difference between men and women to produce unequal results for the latter. The legal system doesn’t recognize these biological differences and how the law affects men and women in different ways due to their gender. In Christine Littleton’s article titled, “Reconstructing Sexual Equality”(1987), she believes that inequality between the sexes result from when society devalues women because they differ from the male norm.…
I have not lived in Minnesota for very long but already I can see that the white majority has a hard time distinguishing the difference between what is being prejudice and what is not. An uneducated person might see this as racism. Depending on who the racial slurs or racial prejudices are coming from. Prejudice is racism with the absence of power. Most people with negative views against minority groups are prejudice because the are coming from a place where they have no influence (Power) on other people and how they think and view minority groups.…