Empire State College
Power and Privilege
October 30, 2018
Exclusion by Race
Social exclusion is the act of making certain groups of people within society feel isolated and unimportant. Disadvantages happen not just for people of a certain race but also based on where you live, sexual orientation, age, and gender. According to Johnson (2018) “Avoidance, exclusion, rejection, and devaluing often happen without anyone intending harm” (P. 50). I am not sure if in this case “they” are not intending to harm anyone, racial exclusion is hurtful and malicious. I can’t see differently after reading through the course information. Americans are known for fighting for what they believe in and fighting for change. So why don’t more people see the need for change when it comes to racial exclusion? I believe the people who can make the biggest impact and a difference in our society are the ones that are secretly enforcing exclusion. After reading the course materials, they are mostly talking about the exclusion by race. Exclusion affected Japanese-American as well after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.
Discrimination takes place in public institutions, for instance, the legal system. After reading the course materials, Mothering a White Sons to Know # BlackLivesMatter, the author spoke about the injustice that people of color are or have experienced by law enforcement. “Police brutality and continued murdering of black and brown people is a race problem and a gender problem, and the intersections of the two – embodied daily in our sons – are within our power to influence. A white mother would never have to prepare her son to be aware of police officers and the upfront racism that they display. Their many cases right now in the US where the police officer has killed African American and was not penalized or the incident was not treated as a crime. As a mother of a teenage daughter, I feel as if I still have a conversation about what is happening in society today with African-American males because it is important. As I quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” So I get that white mothers don’t have to have the same dialogue a black mother, but she should have a conversation about the unjust and unfair society that we live in.
Interestedly enough, there is a mass incarcerated of African Americans now in this country. Let go back the Rockefeller drug law of 1973 placed a lot of blacks in prison/jail for crack-cocaine, however, now that there is an opioid crisis which consists of mostly young white you see laws are changing and there is tons of help out there for them. Black people are much more likely to be shot by police than their white counterparts. According to an article found on www.smithsonianmag.com, it states “…233 African-Americans shot...
