The Anatomy Of Racial Inequality By Glenn C. Loury
1173 Words
5 Pages
Brown University professor, economist, and author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, Glenn C. Loury, presents an argument to reevaluate the true reasons behind the epidemic of mass incarceration in the Boston Review Book, Race, Incarceration, and American Values. In addition, scholars Pamela S. Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loic Wacquant, contribute to Loury’s examination of the impact of mass incarceration in the United States. Loury emphasizes the racial inequalities within society, society’s perceptions of race and crime, as well as, race and welfare. Karlan analyzes the role of voter disenfranchisement within black communities and felon disenfranchisement. Wacquant illuminates the vast affect of society’s views of blackness and the effects
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Loury compares the contemporary mass incarceration of African Americans to the unjust times of slavery in America’s repugnant past. Loury’s comparison of slavery to mass incarceration of African-Americans demonstrates the harsh reality of racial disparity and it’s relation to social hierarchy. For an example, “Our society—the society we have made—creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.” (Loury 28) Hence, Loury argues that the socially constructed American society has created the conditions of the racially disadvantaged, but then penalizes them for it without recognition that they are the ones who have produced and assimilated the circumstances. An additional comparison can be addressed from a film called, “Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998),” which can further emphasize Loury’s argument. “If you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners corrupted from infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded, sire, but that you first make thieves and then punish them?” (IMDb) In either case, the lack of justice to those who are African-American and people who are brought into this world impoverished, are often seen as a blemish on society. As a result, are targeted, socially demonized, and in the end suffer from consequences that they have little control
Loury compares the contemporary mass incarceration of African Americans to the unjust times of slavery in America’s repugnant past. Loury’s comparison of slavery to mass incarceration of African-Americans demonstrates the harsh reality of racial disparity and it’s relation to social hierarchy. For an example, “Our society—the society we have made—creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.” (Loury 28) Hence, Loury argues that the socially constructed American society has created the conditions of the racially disadvantaged, but then penalizes them for it without recognition that they are the ones who have produced and assimilated the circumstances. An additional comparison can be addressed from a film called, “Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998),” which can further emphasize Loury’s argument. “If you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners corrupted from infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded, sire, but that you first make thieves and then punish them?” (IMDb) In either case, the lack of justice to those who are African-American and people who are brought into this world impoverished, are often seen as a blemish on society. As a result, are targeted, socially demonized, and in the end suffer from consequences that they have little control