Bobo asks how we can have milestone decisions like Brown V. Board, pass a civil rights act, a voting act, fair housing acts, and numerous acts of enforcement and amendments, including the pursuit of affirmative action policies and still continue to face a significant racial divide in America. Bobo offers these thoughts on the subject. In America we are witnessing the crystallization of a new racial ideology Bobo refers to as laissez-faire racism. Furthermore race and racism remain powerful levers in American national politics. Additionally social science has played a peculiar role in the problem of race according to Bobo.
Phase #3 IP American Life and Culture in the Post World War II America Submitted by: Lonzo Warren Colorado Technical University HIST125-1201B- 13 Instructor: Fredrick D. Palm March 15, 2012 The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s: In the 1950s America was facing a serious challenge of racism and prejudice. Most of the racial backlash was directed towards the African American populace. Oddly enough the movement of the civil rights was not confined to just one group of people and organization. It made its way to the national forefront on its own merit and it is this merit which kept it on the national spotlight. (www.americanhistory.about.com) Thousands of Americans from all walks of life and races put their lives on the line to take a stand against racial inequalities.
We then begin to learn how society and its people can have a major impact on our lives. This paper will discuss the novel, The Other Wes Moore, describe the sociological perspectives used in sociology and analyze excerpts from the book using each of the three major sociological perspectives. According to Henslin (2012), social location is described as the corners in life that people occupy because of where they are located in a society. In other words social location considers how jobs, income, education, gender, race-ethnicity, and age affect people’s ideas and behavior (Henslin, 2012). The author Wes Moore was a black male that lived in Baltimore as a young child but moved to The Bronx when he was a little older.
W. E. B. Dubois (1868 - 1963) was one of the first sociologists to describe how racism and ethnic discrimination influenced society. He wrote a book each year from 1896 - 1914 describing relations between whites and African-Americans. He was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was a sociologist whose contributions came from theory and social reform, an attacker of injustice and a defender of freedom. How effective are current social programs designed to improve quality of life?
Running Head: Race and Your Community January 10, 2011(change date) (put your course code here…example. ETH/125 Race and Your Community The issue of racism has obtained growing interest at present time because of the new technologies that help to spread information to the most distant parts of the world. ‘Race is discursively produced, a function of socially determined categories that ‘shape human difference in certain seemingly predetermined ways’ […]. Race belongs, then, to the symbolic order of language and social structure. But the discourse of race imprints its meaning on bodies; racial hierarchies work themselves out in a field of corporeal visibility.
Sure, there were many laws that were established and then abolished, but there are some that I believe were some of the most important laws in American history that have contributed to African American history. A few of the laws that I believe were prominent for African Americans were the implementation of segregation laws, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment. These three laws have, in my opinion, shaped the history of African Americans. Segregation laws towards African Americans have existed back to the early 1800’s. During the existence of segregation laws, African Americans lived poor lives.
There is a great deal of academic discussion and analysis regarding racial discourse and one of the fundamental authorities on this subject is B. Harro. His commentary on the Cycles of Socialization and Liberation provide a solid basis from which to analyze images of racial discourse and their impact on the population. The basis of these cycles is the idea of social identity, “we are each born into a specific set of social identities, related to the categories of difference mentioned above, and these social identities predispose us to unequal roles in the dynamic system of oppression” (Harro, 2000, p. 45). By identifying with a certain social group, a person is going to drift toward the stereotypes portrayed for that social group. In this case, social identity contributes heavily to how a person of a particular race lives his or her life, “We get systematic training in ‘how to be’ each of our social identities throughout our lives” (Harro, 2000, p. 45).
Although socioeconomic status is also an important variable in the location of these sites, race is the most significant even after controlling for urban and regional differences. Over 15 million African-American, over 8 million Hispanics, and about 50 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans are living in communities with one or more abandoned or uncontrolled toxic waste sites. Booth (1990) points out that "many of the at-risk communities are victims of land-use decision making that mirrors the power arrangements of the dominant society. Historically, exclusionary zoning has been a subtle form of using government authority and power to foster and perpetuate discriminatory practices." A study by the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that socioeconomic conditions and race are the major factors determining environmental discrimination.
What has first given to us by slave master in separating the house slaves from the field slaves, has now taken place in how we objectify our women and each other. Portrayed in Spike Lee film School Daze, prevalent in the modeling industry, and dating back to the slavery era, Colorism has and still remains a social issue that continues to segregate the black community. Racerelations.about.com defines Colorism as a practice of discrimination by which those with lighter skin are treated more favorably than those with darker skin. Colorism ties in to the field of sociology because it explores the topic of race relations amongst an ethnicity group. The social theory that would apply to the topic of Colorism would be the Scapegoat theory.
It will touch on sociological theories and key reports such as The Black Report (1980), The Health Divide (1987), The Acheson Report (1998) and The Marmot Report (2010) these will explain the impact of what does influence health and why. Social Class was defined by the Registrar General in a system which was used from 1911 up until the 1990s which set this out in relation to occupation, housing, income and education in what may be referred to as a ‘Hierarchy’ system, Graham (2000). There was a growing need to replace this system as the original data collected was based largely on the status, wealth and occupation of the man of the household. Today’s structure of society has changed enormously for example, more women now work outside of the home and work full time even though unemployment levels are at their highest because of the economic recession, (Giddens 2009). Today the classification system used to denote socio-economic class reflects a different society and the terms for different classes have been replaced by; The ‘Advantaged’, ‘Marginalised Insecure’ and the ‘Disadvantaged’ (Graham 2000).