Book Review: Race, Class, and Gender in the United States Leigh Anne Haygood August 10, 2010 Liberty University HSER 509 Dr. Nicole Cross Rothenberg, P. (2010), Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. New York: Worth Publishers. Abstract Rothenberg paints an oppressive picture for women, the financially oppressed and minority members of society. The author presents compelling essays of race, gender and class which examine the social construct of each issue. Race has been defined as the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
In the documentary Jane Elliot focuses on discrimination against women, homosexuals and mostly against African Americans and how society is biased to suit the oppressors. The blue eyed brown eyed exercise teaches white people what its like to be black in the United States of America. This is done by separating the blue eyed people who are all white and the brown eyed people and making the blue eyed people feel inferior by treating them the same way as blacks are treated in society. In the documentary Jane Elliot uses the exercise to make the blue eyed people feel uncomfortable, frustrated, humiliated, and discriminated against. By doing this she is simulating society’s discrimination of minority groups.
Jim Crow was a way of life, not just a set of unjust laws. African-Americans were treated as second class citizens. “Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that whites were the Chosen people, blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to whites.
Color- blind racism is contemporary way of thinking about race that justifies and rationalizes racial inequalities. He claims that whites use the frames of color-blind racism to ignore the truths of racial inequality and to minimize the issues that surround it. He explains the terms of each frame of color-blind racism used by whites he goes into specific detail using various stories, examples, and interviews from different white perspectives in order to prove his point. The first point that Bonilla explains is abstract liberalism. Abstract liberalism hides all the institutional policies put in place by a country founded upon slavery, social, political, and economic inequality as if power and privilege is not still in the hands of those generations of the white upper-class who aren’t so far removed from our very recent past of blatant racial violence, economic disinvestment such as (exclusion of Blacks from land-ownership, public accommodations, equal access to jobs, housing, education), and political and legal discrimination (lack of legal help, lack of political representation, criminalization, racial profiling).
In this short essay I will define institutional racism, its history in American and who it mostly affects. Institutional racism also known as institutional oppression refers to racism perpetrated by government entities, major cooperation’s, schools, the courts or the military (Moore 2008). Unlike the racism perpetrated by individuals, institutional racism has the power to negatively affect the bulk of people belonging to a minority group. This form of racism still persists in America because dominant groups are unwilling to share or give up the benefits inherited from past generations. Through numerous examples, Institutional Racism demonstrates how inequality and racial exclusion are embedded within the fabric of American society.
As stated earlier, the meaning of the word “race” is merely the categorization of different populations, on earth, among humans. If the “Negro” was really one of the lowest races, that would be considered a different specie, he or she wouldn’t be able to reproduce any offspring with someone of white race or a different race. Even though, Dr. Hunt somewhat agrees “that the offspring of all the mixtures of the so-called races of man are
These systematic disparate treatments contribute to a dysfunctional community and lead to the socioeconomic destruction of the African American family infrastructure.” (Coulson-Clark, et. all, 2010) Because racial profiling, discrimination, and the disparities within the criminal justice system seem to always be a topic of concern, the best way to understand what is happening is to research the problem to gain a better perspective and point of view. The need to find the reason behind the higher numbers of
Materialist and structural explanation Due to data gotten from statistics, this explanation supports the idea that social factors like gender, ethnicity and class play an important role on the impact on health. It explains the level of health patterns and inequalities in the population between the social classes. However a weakness is that believes people should not be responsible for the risky lifestyle choices they make and also believe that people do not have the power to their health experience. The Materialist explanation concentrates on the hazards in society and to which some people have no choice but to be exposed eg the lower classes are exposed to more unhealthy environments because they do more dangerous work, have poorer housing, have fewer resources available to secure good health and are unable to use the health services. * -------------------------------------------------
It also allows us to get a glimpse of some of the social and psychological precursors to policy preference by examining its expression across the four treatment groups. (For example, observing that colorblindness remains constant even as health care attitudes change has different implications than observing that colorblind attitudes are correlated with opposition to the new laws.) White Response to Black Leadership While the previous sections have outlined the prevailing schools of racial theory as they relate to policy opinion, an adjacent body of work addresses the attitudes of whites with regard to black political leaders. is field offers limited background for the present study, since scholarship on black leaders has until very recently excluded consideration of the presidency. Nevertheless, a wealth of research on racial politics at the local level may lay a framework by which we can understand whites’ opinions of black politicians in general.
To put it simply, there are two main type of effects on the poverty levels in the black community: structural and behavioral. The first of these two effects is structural, or the situation they have little control over. Henry Louis Gates Jr. indicates in his essay “The Way to Reduce Black Poverty in America” that “Nearly a third of black children are born into poverty,” (451) . Being born into a poor household is not something one has control over. Although, the situations that lead to having a child in poverty can be linked to the second of the effects of poverty levels, behavioral.