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Coggle Assignment / Readings :tada: - Coggle Diagram
Coggle Assignment / Readings :tada:
Aren't systems just people?
"We are always participating in something larger than ourselves, and if we want to understand social life and what happens to people in it, we have to understand what it is that we’re participating in and how we participate in it."
"...the concept of a system refers to any collection of parts or elements that are connected in ways that cohere into some kind of whole. "
People are apart of a system; but they are not that system. Understanding this distinction can help with feelings of guilt.
You cannot change the past and how society raised you to act, but you can choose how you want to change and act as a person today; whether to be apart of the problem or fight against it.
We are not personally responsible for a system and should not feel offended when it gets criticized, but we have the power to shape how a system acts.
"People are what make a system “happen.” Without their participation, a system exists only as an idea with some physical reality attached."
Path of least resistance in social systems allows for racist, sexist, and bigoted people to get away with what they're doing
What is a system of privilege?
"It’s important to note that privilege does not guarantee good outcomes for the privileged group or bad outcomes for everyone else."
"What privilege does is load the odds one way or the other so that the chance of bad things happening to white people as a category of people is much lower than for everyone else, and the chance of good things happening is much higher."
"Privilege is not something a person can have, like a possession, as in “Where’s mine?” Instead, it is a characteristic of the social system—like a rule in a game—in which everyone participates."
White Dominance - The assumption is that positions of power while be ruled by white people and, if a POC were to take that role, they would be seen as an outlier
White Identification - White is the standard culture and for human beings.
i.e POCs being called "nonwhite" instead of their actual race
White Centeredness - Putting white people in the center of the frame in media.
"The white privilege in this example, is the practice of the criminal justice system to overlook or respond less harshly to drug crimes committed by whites, while the corresponding oppressive consequence for people of color is the systematic selection of people of color for arrest, prosecution, and punishment."
Where White Privilege came from
"When the British came to North America, they brought with them both cultural views of race and the expectation of their own position of dominance as a structural feature of any society they might establish. "
White slavery and indentured servants had too great an understanding of their rights an humanity to become permanent slaves.
The Bill of Rights and Constitution went directly against what the British were doing; genocide, slavery, etc; so they distinguished between Whites and "nonwhites" in order to rationalize their crimes.
"Notice, then, how cultural ideas can come into being as a way to justify structural arrangements, and how those same ideas can go on to play a role in shaping other systems in various ways, such as the subordination of Africans and Native Americans when English migrants came to North America to make new lives for themselves. This kind of interaction among the various characteristics of social systems is basic to understanding how social life happens – everything is connected to and has the potential to affect everything else."
"whites in the upper classes carried out a campaign to encourage lower and working-class whites to think of themselves as white – to make “white” an important part of their social identity – as a form of compensation for their miserable situation as workers, as in, “I may be poor, but at least I’m white.”"
All of this started due to social systems and individuals actions in taking the path of least resistance.
How to be an Anti-Racist
Chapter 3
Racial puberty - Aware of being black and the struggles that come with it.
Kendi had become socially aware at age 7, even asking a Black teacher is she was the only Black teacher and why. His parents tried to almost apologize for him, and explain his actions, as if pointing out racial ideas is a taboo.
"Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude."
Prince Henry was praised as the Navigator, when all he really did was create a transatlantic slave trading route, and was never condemned for such.
"From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy."
"I did not mind until I noticed"