Race and Racism Today

I'd like to thank everyone for following my blog for this long! This is my last blog post for Race. Overall it was an extremely interesting book, and I learned a great deal about how the idea of race developed and how it has endured and evolved over centuries. The ending section I read for this blog post was definitely my favorite part of the book because I feel as though it applies to my life. It focused mostly on racism after the Holocaust and racism today.

Aronson raises many questions throughout the book that provoked a great deal of thought. He asks one question that really made me think near the end of the book: "Are we encouraged to believe our biases or doubt them?" (pg. 267).

I believe that in today's age, we receive mixed signals about what to believe about race. Aronson addresses this, stating, "We all make sure to say race doesn't matter. But at the very same time we pass down the message that it matters a great deal" (pg. 257). On one hand, we have people like President Donald Trump broadcasting the message that our biases and racism are okay and should be accepted. On the other hand, we are taught in school to be more accepting of different races and different standpoints. We are taught to doubt our biases, but we also have role models who believe our biases. These conflicting messages encourage some to believe their biases and some to doubt them.

Throughout history, many influential people supported the ideas of race, racial prejudices, and racial separation. In one of my other blog posts, I touched upon the movie The Birth of a Nation, which spread the message that lynchings were needed in our country. Former President Woodrow Wilson saw a screening at that time and praised the movie as "'history written with lighting" (pg. 172). Presidents are in a position of power and extreme influence. When a president supports something, many others think that it is okay to believe the same things. Hearing from President Wilson that the racist ideas The Birth of a Nation put forward are worth praise, most likely made others feel as though it is okay to believe the biases they had about black people. Similarly to the 1900s, we now have a president who broadcasts the same messages. President Trump gives very racially charged speeches, which are often very derogatory. When President Trump began running for president, he gave a speech calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists (Leonhardt). He used a stereotype to label a large group of people, which is an action that we as a country should try to avoid. Unfortunately, given that our leader does so, many other people are inclined to do so as well.

Donald Trump giving a speech announcing his campaign for the 2016 election.

Donald Trump. CBS News, 16 June 2016, www.cbsnews.com/news/
     donald-trump-is-running-for-president-in-2016/. Accessed 10 Apr. 2018.

Trump encourages us to believe our biases. He believes his own biases. Trump has retweeted white nationalists without a drop of remorse. In 2016, he retweeted a white supremacist Twitter account, which has since been suspended (Leonhardt). The tweet itself did not relate to white supremacy, but the Twitter account promoted white supremacy. In addition to retweeting white supremacists on Twitter, President Trump also refused to disavow David Duke in an interview, the former leader of the KKK, after receiving an endorsement from him because he doesn't "know anything about him." In the same interview, he also refused to state that he would not condemn white supremacists groups because there could be some groups that are "totally fine." Accepting and tolerating the behavior of white supremacists opens the gate for more people to act in a racist way. After the Civil War, we planned to remove the troops from the South, and people's mindset was: "if removing federal troops from the South after the 1876 election left blacks at the mercy of the Ku Klux Klan, that was their fate" (pg. 165). This mindset encouraged people to believe their biases because they had no other form of authority leading them to doubt them, which resulted in the lynching of nearly 4,000 black people. Acceptance that the leaders showed in the 1800s and President Trump shows now encourages us to believe our biases about people of other races. 

At the same time, we are also now encouraged to doubt our biases. In school, we are taught to be accepting and we learn about the difficulties people of other races go through. This unit and this blog is an example of such teaching. Race has taught me a lot about what African-Americans and people of other races have to deal with, and it makes me more understanding and more aware of my own prejudices. We talk a great deal about biases and discrimination in the psychology class that I'm taking and about the cognitive and social reasoning behind the prejudices people harbor. It is very interesting to learn more about prejudices, but it also encourages me to doubt my prejudices because I know where they stem from and understand that they should not drive our actions or thoughts. Some prejudices only exist because one group wanted to blame another group for the problems they were having. This is called the "scapegoat theory." Knowing this encourages me to doubt my prejudices because blaming a different group for someone's problems is unnecessary. I am encouraged to disbelieve by biases because I know they are being thrust upon me by the general ideas of society. Being aware of prejudices is the first step to doubting your biases, and then eventually ridding yourself of prejudices fully (although this is hard to achieve). 

In my English class, we took an implicit bias test on Tuesday. It was created by Project Implicit at Harvard University, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has not taken it yet. This is another way that you can learn about your implicit biases. I got the result that I slightly preferred whites to blacks. I expected to receive a result that said that I had some kind of bias because almost everyone has some sort of bias and because I know that I am guilty of having some prejudiced thoughts. Even so, it is still helpful to see that I have that bias, so in the future if a biased thought pops up in my mind, I know that it's just my bias and it is not actually true. By learning about my biases and our society's biases in school, I am encouraged to doubt my prejudices because I know that they do not have any foundation to them. 

The conflicting messages sent out by our society allows room for people to decide whether to believe or doubt their biases. In my life, I have been most encouraged to doubt my biases, but people's experiences differ based on where they live, what political party they support, and what kind of family they have. President Trump encourages people to believe their biases, and Race encourages me to doubt my biases. 

Thank you so much for sticking with me through my blogging adventure. Aronson's writing was very strong, easy to read, and extremely thought-provoking. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the history of race and how it became such an important part of our society today. 

Works Cited

Leonhardt, David, and Ian Prasad Philbrick. "Donald Trump’s Racism: The
     Definitive List." The New York Times, 15 Jan. 2018. The New York Times,
     www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/15/opinion/leonhardt-trump-racist.html.
     Accessed 11 Apr. 2018.

Race Argument

Welcome to my fourth blog post! Thank you all for responding to the question I posed at the end of my last blog post; it was really interesting to be able to hear your thoughts. I have now read up through part five out of seven in Race, so I have been able to get a good feel for the book. What has been difficult is finding a single argument because the book covers so much material. For this post, to keep it short (which is actually pretty long), I narrowed it down to two to talk about.

Although Aronson says that he wants us, as readers, to be able to think about the issues for ourselves, his writing and the facts he incorporates sends a message. He has different arguments about specific parts of racial bias and prejudices, but one of the main arguments that he has is that prejudice affects minority groups negatively around the world, and we can never seem to be without it. This argument is why I asked, at the end of my last blog post, if we can ever be without prejudice because, by the descriptions Aronson gives, it seems as though we can't.

The negative effect of prejudice is shown through the many depictions of the violence that occurs against different races. Over the course of the book, Aronson describes the horrible things that happened to people of many different races, so that we would be able to see the negative effect it has on so many people. Specifically, the section that I read this week, focused on the Holocaust a great deal. The seeds of the Holocaust were planted when Adolf Hitler categorized Jews as a race. In his book, Mein Kampf, he said "'Jewry is without question a race and not a religious fellowship. The effect of Jewry will be a racial tuberculosis of nations'" (pg. 205). By separating the Jews and forming them into a completely separate race, Hitler created prejudice against them, so he was able to win over Germany and start one of the worst genocides ever. Aronson describes the horrible treatment Jewish people endured over the course of the Holocaust: "Nazi doctors experimented with plunging people into freezing water to observe the damage to them, and to determine how to best recover" (pg. 214). They did this in order to determine how to best treat German pilots whose planes had been shot down into the sea. The examples of the inhumane treatment of the Jews strengthen the argument that prejudice has a negative effect on people because it shows the violence that minorities have to endure. 

A poster used by the Nazi Party to explain the Nuremberg Laws. The Laws defined what ancestry a person had to have in order to be a "pure" German. 

Nuremberg Laws. Jewish Virtual Library, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/

     background-and-overview-of-the-nuremberg-laws. Accessed 4 Apr. 2018.

Aronson shows the widespread effect of prejudice throughout Race by exploring racism in countries all around the world. When he addresses the status of Jews, he mentions all the groups he has explored in different countries: "The same pillar of race theory that confined Africans, Irish, and Indians to eternal subhuman status was now applied to Jews" (pg. 184). This statement encompasses many of the groups that Aronson investigates throughout the book: Africans, Irish, Native Americans, and Jews. Even earlier in the book, he explains prejudices in Rome and Greece. All of these groups are affected by prejudice and bias in a negative way. 

Through exploring all the prejudices in different cultures all over the world, Aronson strengthens his argument by making you wonder if there could ever be a world without prejudice. For me, seeing the horrible way that many different groups were treated over centuries makes me feel as though we can't. Like I said in my last blog post, in America, we went from prohibiting Africans from becoming citizens to blocking Asians from becoming citizens. It seems like as soon as one prejudice fades away, another takes its place. When the Irish started arriving in America, there was a great deal of prejudice against them: "many Americans saw the Irish as 'savage,' brutish,' ape-like" (pg. 146). They were only accepted as "responsible white Americans" when they redirected the prejudice back to black people in America. This shows how prejudice never truly goes away, it just gets moved from one party to another, which is one of the points of Aronson's argument. 

One other big argument that Aronson forms is that race is a social construct. He addresses this when he writes about how race is created. When he describes how the ideas of race are formulated, he explains the background of who came up with the ideas and what they led to. For example, he explains how the first pillar of race, that physical differences matter, came into existence. He describes how Augustine depicted "monstrous men," people who were savages. Aronson writes, "with the monstrous men, physical characteristics had become crucial. The first pillar of what would become 'race' was in place" (pg. 73). The distinction was obviously created by people in society, which shows that race is a social construct and not a real thing. Without people, racial distinctions would not exist. Another way Aronson shows this idea is by putting race in quotation marks. He does that in the quote I used before, but also in many other places. In the same paragraph as the quote above, Aronson puts race in quotation marks three times: "the invention of monstrous men was a crucial crossing point on the way to the idea of 'race,'" "would later take to form as 'race,'" and "what would become 'race'" (pg. 73). Putting race in quotes exemplifies how it is not real and is something society just made up, which is what Aronson is arguing. 

I personally agree with the claims that Aronson makes. First, I am absolutely 100 percent certain that prejudice affects people all over the world, and it has a very negative effect on those people. Like Aronson, I am not certain if we would be able to live without prejudice. In an ideal world, we would be able to, but our world has never been ideal. Like Aronson shows us, it seems like we can't get rid of one prejudice without another taking over. As for race being a social construct, I completely agree. Throughout the course of Race, I have seen how different people "invent" aspects of race, all of which never would have existed without society's influence. 

Aronson has made very strong arguments throughout the book, and I am looking forward to seeing what he does to end Race. Thank you for making it to the end of this very long post!