Week 4

It is impossible to privilege one group without disadvantaging another.
-Laura Pulido

Whiteness, in this country, is the paramount factor in deciding supremacy over and subordination of all other groups of color. The idea of whiteness as superior has manifested itself in both institutionalized racism within the legal system and the conscious production of racialized environmental inequities. What results is a vastly unequal distribution of wealth and power that is largely ignored and rarely contested. Harris and Pulido address the notion of white privilege and the highly implicated manifestations of such.

In order to fully understand the ramifications of white privilege, Harris traces the history and trajectory of white privilege as going from “color to race to status to property” (1714), where the nature of whiteness necessary entails “a right to exclude” (1714) and a right to define. When given the power to define race and social hierarchies, the “external imposition of definition maintains the social equilibrium” (1765). Thus, while whites have historically been given the role to define all races regardless of status, people of color have historically been forced to take a passive role in that process, where those racial definitions has been imposed upon them. The process of defining race is inevitably linked to white supremacy and white privilege. Yet there continues to be an almost blindness to white privilege and the inherent racism within our society. Whites are rarely cognizant of their own white privilege, yet all are still able to enjoy the effects of such. The fact that there is an “inability to sever intent from outcome that allows whites to acknowledge that racism exists, yet seldom identify as racists” (Pulido 15) continues the cycle of subtle or entrenched institutions tacitly employing racial subordination.

Although the readings of the week did not necessarily focus primarily on the connections between white privilege and socioeconomic status, I found the linkage to be very interesting. Both Pulido and Harris emphasize the oppression of race above the oppression of class, noting that “those whites that are disadvantaged in society suffer not because of their race, but in spite of it” (Harris 1786). In a society that is built on the oppression of people, of “the other”, whether the oppression is felt through class or race or both attests to the massive injustices forced upon the people. Thus, the “articulation of racism is predicated…on class divisions” (Pulido 27). It seems as though class and race is invariably linked. Because, let’s be honest, those in the super affluent and upper classes are rarely non-white.

Week 3

Such intimate entanglements between racial formation and the state thus remind us that all racial identities are always preeminently political identities.
-Nicholas De Genova

Race politics in the United States have been that of perpetuation of “the other” in order to maintain a hegemonic White society based on exclusion and White privilege. Through immigration laws, racial formations, and racial triangulation respectively, Ngai, De Genova, and Kim address the ways in which Asians and Latinos have been subjugated and maintained as socially stigmatized groups. The large immigration of both these populations has “modified the racial map of the nation” (Ngai 8) and drastically altered the previously pervading notion of a Black-White binary.

The racialized experience of both Asians and Latinos is fundamentally different than that of African Americans. De Genova suggests both groups can be historically placed in parallel with Native Americans. He specifically distinguishes the African American experience, one that was “fully encompassed within an ‘American’ social order of white power and prestige” (2) with that of the Native American, typically seen as an outsider “with an excess of ‘culture’” (5) and thus an inability to assimilate to that same social order. Asians specifically, Kim notes, have been subject to a problematic triangulation, where they are valorized while also ostracized from society in maintenance of White dominance. This valorization is seen through the creation of the model minority myth, placing Asians above other disenfranchised groups due to material success. The model minority myth reinforces the notion that all races are expected to follow the same trajectory, notwithstanding the wholly structural discrimination and unequal opportunities available. By creating a “good minority/bad minority opposition” (Kim 118), and thus relating the “good” minority to whiteness, society and media perpetuate the racial domination and superiority of whites, both socially and civically, over people of color.

Continued racist practices enforced by institutions, policies, and the media, attempt to idolize one sector of the population while demonizing another, blatantly seen in the model minority myth. Racialized institutions specifically target certain groups, from Blacks to Latinos, and currently Arabs, as a means to cultivate certain political agendas. Regardless of the historically targeted minority group, the maintenance of White racial domination is an interminable structure to keep non-whites powerless. And although no longer blatantly directed by the government, the inherent structural racism of this society cannot be disregarded.

Week 2

The political, and thus inherently racial, implications of space and landscape are inextricably linked to the role of race in society. Omi and Winant emphasize that the history of the United States has consistently been “characterized by racial despotism, denial of political rights, and policies of minority extirpation.” Thus, those in power, primarily whites, are able to continually control the spatial disparities in neighborhoods throughout the United States. The “repressive apparatus” controlled by the state is typified by the discrimination and racial structure of the housing market and neighborhoods that Lipsitz, Schein, and Rojas expound upon. Although Omi and Winant explain the ability of racially disadvantaged populations affecting political notions of race through political action and prominent social movements. This, however, is counteracted by the reality and nature of politically institutionalized racial discrimination that continues to be prevalent today. The racialized normative landscapes of Lexington, Kentucky’s Cheapside and Thoroughbred Park are clear evidence of such. Lipsitz suggests that the “racial projects of American society have always been spatial projects as well”. Race and space are therefore fundamentally connected.

The fact that Omi and Winant stress the idea of race as a crux to realized identities, and what Schein reinforces as “to be part of a landscape, to drive our identity from it is an essential precondition of our being-in-the-world,” implies that racial identities are rooted in the spaces that we take up, in the neighborhoods and houses in which we live. Then, because deprived populations occupy obviously deleterious and underprivileged spaces, the basis of their racial identity is innately less stable than that of those who occupy unmistakably privileged spaces. This is further elucidated by the popular notion of the “purity” of white spaces in direct opposition to “dirty” spaces inhabited by blacks or people of color.

Would it then be possible for the United States to move beyond such a racialized notion of space and place when the very basis of its creation has been the exploitation and discrimination of “non-normative” populations? Will such populations ever maintain any status of power or level of exclusiveness that is primarily associated with white communities?