These are the required reading + required video:
VIDEO:
READING:
What is Racial Domination?
Matthew Desmond Mustafa Emirbayer
I am only requiring the discussion on the Five Fallacies of Racism
Desmond, M. and Emirbayer, M., 2009. WHAT IS RACIAL DOMINATION?. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 6(2), pp.335-355.
Five Fallacies About Racism
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (2005), there are hundreds of active hate groups across the country. These groups are mostly found in the Southern states—Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina have over forty active groups per state— but California ranks highest in the nation, housing within its borders fifty-three groups. For some people, hate groups epitomize what the essence of racism amounts to: intentional acts of humiliation and hatred. While such acts undoubtedly are racist in nature, they are but the tip of the iceberg. To define racism only through extreme groups and their extreme acts is akin to defining weather only through hurricanes. Hurricanes are certainly a type of weather pattern—a harsh and brutal type—but so too are mild rainfalls, light breezes, and sunny days. Likewise, racism is much broader than violence and epithets. It also comes in much quieter, everyday-ordinary forms (cf. Essed 1991 [1984]).
Americans are deeply divided over the legacies and inner workings of racism, and a large part of this division is due to the fact that many Americans understand racism in limited or misguided ways (Alba et al., 2005; Nadeau et al., 1993). We have identified five fallacies, recurrent in many public debates (see, e.g., Harper and Reskin, 2005; Reskin 1998; Sears et al., 2000), fallacies one should avoid when thinking about racism.
Individualistic Fallacy
Here, racism is assumed to belong to the realm of ideas and prejudices. Racism is only the collection of nasty thoughts that a “racist individual” has about another group. Someone operating with this fallacy thinks of racism as one thinks of a crime and, therefore, divides the world into two types of people: those guilty of the crime of racism (“racists”) and those innocent of the crime (“non-racists”) (Wacquant 1997). Crucial to this misconceived notion of racism is intentionality. “Did I intentionally act racist? Did I cross the street because I was scared of the Hispanic man walking toward me, or did I cross for no apparent reason?” Upon answering “no” to the question of intentionality, one assumes one can classify one’s own actions as “nonracist,” despite the character of those actions, and go about his or her business as innocent. This conception of racism simply will not do, for it fails to account for the racism that is woven into the very fabric of our schools, political institutions, labor markets, and neighborhoods. Conflating racism with prejudice, as Herbert Blumer (1958) pointed out fifty years ago, ignores the more systematic and structural forms of racism; it looks for racism within individuals and not institutions. Labeling someone a “racist” shifts our attention from the social surroundings that enforce racial inequalities and miseries to the individual with biases. It also lets the accuser off the hook—“He is a racist; I am not”—and treats racism as aberrant and strange, whereas American racism is rather normal. Furthermore, intentionality is in no way a prerequisite for racism. Racism is often habitual, unintentional, commonplace, polite, implicit, and well meaning ~Brown et al., 2003!. Thus, racism is located not only in our intentional thoughts and actions; it also thrives in our unintentional thoughts and habits, as well as in the social institutions in which we all are embedded (Bonilla-
Silva 1997; Feagin et al., 2001).
Legalistic Fallacy
This fallacy conflates de jure legal progress with de facto racial progress. One who operates under the legalistic fallacy assumes that abolishing racist laws (racism in principle) automatically leads to the abolition of racism writ large (racism in practice). This fallacy will begin to crumble after a few moments of critical reflection. After all, we would not make the same mistake when it comes to other criminalized acts: Laws against theft do not mean that one’s car will never be stolen. By way of tangible illustration, consider Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that abolished de jure segregation in schools. The ruling did not lead to the abolition of de facto segregation: fifty years later, schools are still drastically segregated and drastically unequal (Neckerman 2007; Oaks 2005). In fact, some social scientists have documented a nationwide movement of educational resegregation, which has left today’s schools even more segregated than those of 1954 (see Eaton 1994; Harris 2006; Orfield 1993).
Tokenistic Fallacy
One guilty of the tokenistic fallacy assumes that the presence of people of color in influential positions is evidence of the eradication ofracial obstacles. Although it is true that non-Whites have made significant inroads to seats of political and economic power over the course of the last fifty years, a disproportionate number remain disadvantaged in these arenas (Alexander 2006; Patterson 1997). Exceptions do not prove the rule. We cannot, in good conscience, ignore the millions of African Americans living in poverty and, instead, point to Oprah Winfrey’s millions as evidence for economic equality. Rather, we must explore how Winfrey’s financial success can coexist with the economic deprivation of millions of Black women. We need to explore, in historian Thomas Holt’s words, how the “simultaneous idealization of Colin Powell,” or, for that matter, Barack Obama, “and demonization of blacks as a whole . . . is replicated in much of our everyday world” (2000, p. 6).
Besides, throughout the history of America, one has been able to find at least a handful of non-White individuals who excelled financially and politically in the teeth of rampant racial domination. The first Black congressman was not elected after the Civil Rights Movement but in 1870. Joseph Rainey, a former slave, served four terms in the House of Representatives. Madame C. J. Walker is accredited as being the first Black millionaire. Born in 1867, Walker made her fortune inventing hair and beauty products. Few people would feel comfortable pointing to Rainey’s and Walker’s success as evidence that late nineteenth-century America was a time of racial harmony and equity. Such tokenistic logic would not be accurate then, and it is not accurate now.
Ahistorical Fallacy
This fallacy renders history impotent. Thinking hindered by the ahistorical fallacy makes a bold claim: Most U.S. history—namely, the period of time when this country did not extend basic rights to people of color (let alone classify them as fully human)—is inconsequential today. Legacies of slavery and colonialism, the eradication of millions of Native Americans, forced segregation, clandestine sterilizations and harmful science experiments, mass disenfranchisement, race-based exploitation, racist propaganda distributed by the state caricaturing Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics, racially motivated abuses of all kinds ~sexual, murderous, and dehumanizing!—all of this, purport those operating under the ahistorical fallacy, are too far removed to matter to those living in the here-and-now. This idea is so erroneous it is difficult to take seriously. Today’s society is directed, constructed, and molded by—indeed grafted onto—the past (Ngai 2004; Patterson 1998; Winant
2001). And race, as we have already seen, is a historical invention. A “soft version” of the ahistorical fallacy might admit that events in the “recent past”—such as the time since the Civil Rights Movement or the attacks on September 11—matter while things in the “distant past”—such as slavery or the colonization of Mexico—have little consequence. But this idea is no less fallacious than the “hard version,” since many events in America’s “distant past”—especially the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans—are the most consequential in shaping present day society. In this vein, consider the question French historian Marc Bloch poses to us: “But who would dare to say that the understanding of the Protestant or Catholic Reformation, several centuries removed, is not far more important for a proper grasp of the world today than a great many other movements of thought or feeling, which are certainly more recent, yet more ephemeral” (1953, p. 41!)
Fixed Fallacy
Those who assume that racism is fixed—that it is immutable, constant across time and space—partake in the fixed fallacy. Since they take racism to be something that does not develop at all, those who understand racism through the fixed fallacy are often led to ask questions such as: “Has racism increased or decreased in the past decade?” And because practitioners of the fixed fallacy usually take as their standard definition of racism only the most heinous forms—racial violence, for example—they confidently conclude that, indeed, things have gotten better.
It is important and useful to trace the career of American racism, analyzing, for example, how racial attitudes or measures of racial inclusion and exclusion have changed over time, and many social scientists have developed sophisticated techniques for doing so (e.g., Almaguer 1994; Bobo 2001; Patterson 1998; Schuman et al., 1997). But the question, “Have things gotten better or worse?,” is legitimate only after we account for the morphing attributes of racism. We cannot quantify racism like we can quantify, say, birthrates. The nature of “birthrate” does not fluctuate over time; thus, it makes sense to ask, “Are there more or less births now than there were fifty years ago?” without bothering to analyze if and how a birthrate is different today than it was in previous historical moments. American racism, on the other hand, assumes different forms in different historical moments. Although race relations today are informed by those of the past, we cannot hold to the belief that twenty-first-century racism takes on the exact same form as twentieth-century racism. And we certainly cannot conclude that there is “little or no racism” today because it does not resemble the racism of the 1950s. ~Modern-day Christianity looks very different, in nearly every conceivable way, than the Christianity of the early church. But this does not mean that there is “little or no Christianity” today.! So, before we ask, “Have things gotten better or worse?,” we should ponder the essence of racism today, noting how it differs from racism experienced by those living in our parents’ or grandparents’ generation. And we should ask, further, to quote Holt again, “What enables racism to reproduce itself after the historical conditions that initially gave it life have disappeared” (2000, p. 20)?
THESE ARE THE REQUIRED QUESTIONS:
Answer the following questions, using the assigned readings/videos to support your argument:
This section discusses how it is important for us to know our history in order for us to understand our now. Why do you think that it is important for us to look at our past?
How can you relate this to the Racial Domination Article?
As discussed in your textbook, explain and discuss 2 historical instances/social policies that could explain the current wealth disparities among different racial groups. Why do you think they have contributed to racial economic inequality.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin illegal, therefore racial discrimination is no longer an issue, especially in our labor market.
Prove or disprove this argument.
Support your argument with two examples.
How can you use the Racial Domination Article to support your argument?
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