Blog Post 5

The solution that I most saw to this problem was to change the school system. After reading several excerpts from "Savage Inequalities" by Jonathan Kozol, I began to more understand how this cycle of poverty works and how it affects children and families of color. 

“It, is a matter of national pride that every child's ship be kept afloat.  Otherwise our nation would be subject to the charge that we deny poor chil­dren public school.  But what is now encompassed by the one word ('school") are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and inten­tion, serve entirely different roles.  Both are needed for our nation’s governance.  But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed.  The former are given the imaginative range to mobilize ideas for economic growth; the latter are pro­vided with the discipline to do the narrow tasks the first group will prescribe.
Societies cannot be all generals, no soldiers.  But, by our schooling pat­terns, we assure that soldiers' children are more likely to be soldiers and that the offspring of the generals will have at least the option to be generals.  If this is not so, if it is just a matter of the difficulty of assuring perfect fairness, why does the unfairness never benefit the children of the poor?”

Children who grow up in lower socioeconomic classes have very little opportunity to rise from that. Our education system is designed to help those with privilege advance and keep those who are less fortunate in their respective place. Being a student at Payton where we have access to so many resources and tools to help us achieve the highest level of success, it is not something that has even crossed my mind. That helped me decide to want to contact the U.S. Department of Education as well as volunteer at my local elementary school to help educate kids about their options and the importance of education. 

Blog Post 4- South Africa Post Apartheid and How this Relates to the US

Most of South Africa's problems were blamed on the Apartheid system, and introducing a new democratic government with Nelson Mandela as the president would help take care of the racial conflict that plagued South Africa. The results were not as great as everyone hoped they would be. South Africa had experienced a spike in population post apartheid, but the income inequality grew instead of shrank. The black population had a very slight increase in income, but the white population had a more significant increase in income. The asian population had a huge spike after Mandela stepped down as president, and the mixed race only slightly increased its wage. Blacks made up 79.2% of the country’s 51.8 million people, according to the 2011 census, up from 77.4% in 1996; whites were 8.9% of the population, down from 11% in 1996. There were more black leaders and black individuals in positions of power post-Apartheid, but the racial socioeconomic gap was still as big as ever. This then made me question what hope the USA has in decreasing the socioeconomic gap between races, as we have never even experienced apartheid. After slavery was abolished everything seemed well, and we as a country choose to only briefly speak about slavery in our history classes, but the long term effects of slavery are still in effect. Just like the articles in class that we read about how the war on drugs is like the new Jim Crowe, we are still experiencing racism that is cleverly covered up by our government.

Blog Post 3

The use of race as a tool for certain groups to take control of others is also explained by both the conflict and functionalist perspectives. The social conflict approach suggests that people separate themselves into opposing groups, one representing the advantaged and the other the disadvantaged. Race is often used as a factor for separation, which leads to the exploitation and dehumanization of certain races. This then carries on into the way our society behaves towards a race and how a certain race is treated. Race is a source of identity, which is why behavior and meaning of interactions changes depending on the race of the individual we are interacting with. Something that is related to race is dialect, which is a major influence on how people perceive you and interact with you. Obviously there will always be inequality, and in order for certain groups to feel advantaged and gain power, they must bring other groups down. During the age of colonization, Europeans called black Africans "humans in the rough" and believed it was their job to bring them to the same level as Europe. Because of this, they took advantage of the natives and used them for work and resources to better themselves, while justifying their actions through colonization and "improving" the country.

Blog Post 2

The next step of my project was to learn more about race and how different societies treat the issue of race. I began learning about this idea of race being socially constructed a little earlier then when we started talking about it in class. I am a middle class white girl and I recognize that I am very privileged, and I've never really thought about race that far. It really struck me as interesting that nobody is really born into a race, you're born with physical features that resemble your background, and then you are socialized into behaving a certain way. There is no biological feature that deems how you behave or what your personality is, and race is simply a hierarchal manner that allows certain groups to take control of others. This also correlated with what we were learning in class, because as we were learning about agents of socialization I was researching how we learn about race. Different agents of socialization act to influence children about race, and the way media portrays the issue of race affects how children view and act. When every Asian on TV is portrayed as being a genius and every black person is less educated, children believe that they will fill those roles. This once again goes back to the idea that we are not born with these personality traits, our society has established that certain characteristics are associated with each race and we grow up to believe that they are true.

Blog Post 1

The beginning of this project was inspired by my trip to South Africa, and the contrasting levels of poverty that I saw between neighborhoods. Growing up in Chicago, I see differences in socioeconomic status all the time while traveling between neighborhoods. But nothing I've seen in
chicago compared to what i was witnessing in South Africa. Multi-million dollar homes with huge electric fences around them were blocks away from neighborhoods that lived in metal shacks with no plumbing or electricity. The fact that such wealthy people could live right next to people suffering from poverty and not even blink an eye was really was struck me and made me more interested in the problem. Upon research, I wasn't surprised to learn that most of the higher income individuals were white and a majority of the people living in poverty were colored. This is what inspired me to learn more about the issue of race and how it plays into economic status and life in society.