My name is Devontae and I am a freshman from central Jersey. I live in Wigg, and as I write this very post the Red Line is causing the floor to rumble beneath my feet.
Outside of class, I give tours (look out for me in my straw hat and “Hahvahd shirt”) and work at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. I am also a member of the IOP’s Politics of Race and Ethnicity program. In line with that, my academic interest lie in social identity and its relationship and dependence on public policy in the social realm, and as such, well, who knows what I’ll concentrate in — perhaps Social Studies, perhaps Sociology, perhaps Hist and Lit. We’ll see.
I am a black male, so I am taking this class to “claim” my space in the conversation. Discussions nationwide about racial inequality, etc., are often basically about me and people who look and are perceived to be like me. So I feel that it is my right and my obligation to myself to actually be a part of the conversation about me. With respect to my own racial identity, I am still trying to figure out where I fit in into a flawed racial and ethnic scheme. African American? Black? Black American? Afro-American? What best describes me and my heritage? Even further, how do I reconcile that label and identity with other facets, such as being queer, adopted, Catholic, a Northerner with Southern roots?
These are questions that confront many members of the black community — perhaps, then, I’ll find answers by studying the sociology of the black community.
Demonstrators react to tear gas fired by police during protests over the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 18, 2014. Photo by Lucas Jackson/Reuters
One of our class members, Winnie, sent the link to this opinion piece on the Black Lives Matter Movement, written by Jason R. Wiley for the Wall Street Journal.
“The reality is that Michael Brown is dead because he robbed a convenience store, assaulted a uniformed officer and then made a move for the officer’s gun. The reality is that a cop is six times more likely to be killed by someone black than the reverse. The reality is that the Michael Browns are a much bigger threat to black lives than are the police. “Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11,” wrote former New York City police detectiveEdward Conlon in a Journal essay on Saturday.”
“But the left has no interest in discussing ghetto pathology. Summer movies like “Straight Outta Compton” are too busy glorifying it, and summer books like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” are too busy intellectualizing it. The Black Lives Matter crowd has become an appendage of the civil-rights industry, which uses the black underclass to push an agenda that invariably leaves the supposed beneficiaries worse off.”
While the piece is undoubtedly riddled with problems, logical fallacies and is, I would argue, myopic in many respects, it has some use value in terms of placing it in conversation with the week’s readings by Julius and Terry. The piece regurgitates many arguments that scholars, like Professor Bobo, through sociological research, have disproved. Riley recycles the trope of “ghetto pathology” and his piece is an example of laissez-faire racism which Bobo and Smith argue is the current racial attitude of the age. The theory states that the United States has moved from overt bigotry and government sanctioned discrimination to a laissez-faire ideology where blacks (and other minorities) are themselves blamed for the socioeconomic gap between blacks and whites . Bobo and Smith argue that laissez-faire racism is based on notions of black cultural inferiority (during Jim Crow it was biological inferiority). Within this ideology efforts to ameliorate racist social conditions and institutions are actively resisted which allows for white comfort with and acceptance of persisting racial inequalities and exploitation.
Precisely because of its problem, we can use Riley’s opinion piece to think critically about the black poor and the relationship between race and class, the age of laissez-faire racism as well as engage constructive critiques of protest movements, which Julius and Terry both engage in their pieces which we read for this week.
Julius’s piece “The Declining Significance of Race: Revisited and Revised” “relates racial issues to the economic and political arrangements of society” (55) and argues that while racial antagonisms and oppression still exist, the interaction between racial discrimination and class position have changed and are integral for understanding the contemporary moment. Julius asserts that there is a deep chasm in the African American community wherein the black poor are continuously falling further behind higher-income blacks. Julius further argues that “the real issue is improving the plight of the black lower class, whose conditions have not been addressed by programs like affirmative action” (62).
Terry’s piece “After Ferguson” addresses the purported end of the “age of Obama,” the emblematic “prophet of racial reconciliation” in light of the moral outrage and civic distrust erupting out of the Ferguson protests. Terry teases out the nuances of the Black Lives Matter movement, the criticisms and critiques it has faced, particularly in comparison to the Civil Rights movement, in which the former is deemed deficient in comparison, its positives and the ways in which it can move forward. Of the many poignant critiques and suggestions Terry offers he contends that:
“the challenge for today’s inheritors of the civil rights example…can be met only by exposing the mechanisms of injustice through spectacular confrontation, but also by disclosing the limits of existing institutions – which entails the advancement of new models for the organization of society”
I find Terry’s notions of exposure and disclosure particularly salient as it seems as though the way in which laissez-faire racism operates (hand in hand with color-blind rhetoric) is to obscure particular realities of our institutions and structures, rendering them blurry or completely invisible.
Terry’s question is the question I’m also left with and will reiterate:
“How might these struggles best develop, and be informed by, the most incisive ideas concerning the reformation and reconstruction of our fundamental institutions an modes of citizenship?”
