A Challenging Democracy

The movie clip entitled “A Challenge to Democracy” is the story of the Japanese Americans sent to live in interment camps during the war. The film clip gives an outline of what really went on during the time those people spent at the camps.
The movie starts with the massive transferring of Japanese people into the various interment camps from the west coast to the south of America. The people arrived at these camps with little or nothing. Families were put into rooms very small in size containing a couple beds, pillows, and chairs. In those small rooms relatively large families had to call this home for months and in most cases a year or more. When the people first arrived they had really no source of farming available, because they were mostly relocated to unsettled areas. The people had to rebuild irrigation systems, tend to the fields, and restart the whole process of being able to produce a main source of food for the people. Besides farming the interments camps were different from any type camps previously known in history. In the camps the people went to school and worked basically like they were in a normal environment as possible. The American government began to release Japanese after they were in the process of Americanization in these internment camps. Most were released after they had been determined to be loyal Americans. A few however were not released and had to spend time at one camp for the duration of the war. The people who were released back into society proved to be a valuable source to the American workforce, descried by most employers as very skilled and hardworking.
My question for this movie would be as to why they would put the people in camps for so long; not letting them lives their lives in a natural environment.
I believe that after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the United States felt pressure and didn’t know exactly if they could trust the Japanese Americans because they were not sure of their loyalty. So to the Government their best option available would be to put the people in an area where they could not contact without being regulated, to insure them that there were no spies in the United States. There were probably better and more stable options, but when put in that type of predicament being under much duress I believe they came up with the most resourceful solution to the problem at hand at that present time.

Chapter 4- Making Privilege Happen

I read Chapter four of the Johnson’s “Power, Privilege, and Difference” entitle making Privilege Happen. In this chapter we are given a basic overview of the how people actually make privilege happen. It is said that privilege is attached to social categories and not individuals. It also said that people are the ones that make privilege happen through what they do and don’t do in relation to others. The book gives a clear explanation of the word discrimination, which means to treat people unequally simply because they belong to a particular category. Discrimination is connected to how we think and feel about people, and prejudice plays a powerful role in this. Prejudice is a very complicated thing because it involves both ideas and feelings, another form of prejudice is known as racial prejudice. Racial Prejudice includes values that elevate whiteness above color and the belief that whites are smarter, and promotes negative feelings toward people of color. We learn just how much an impact of where a person lives really affects their life in the long run. Another important detail is also brought to our attention, which is that racism is not the only form of oppression; an ongoing epidemic also threatens women and gay men. A fact stated in the book tells that most jobs are segregated by gender; half of all workers would have to change occupations in order for women and men to be equally represented in the U.S. economy. What were also stated were the facts that black people and Latinos are significantly overly represented in clerical and support occupations, like government jobs such as mail carriers, and lower-level service and blue-collar jobs. The injustices of heterosexism, ableism, and racism affect not only the people in the categories but everyone else as well. A question that needs to be answered is how can we get more people of minority groups into higher-level jobs that can help even the gap of the between them and whites. The answer to this question would be to help disable racism and ableism to ensure others a more equal chance to qualify and attain a job of a greater level in society. I believe that the black people, and even women and gay people should have always received fair and equal treatment. I believe that everyone should be given an opportunity to prove themselves instead of being automatically disqualified for something based on a category they belong too.

Chapter 3 (Johnson)- Capitalism, Class, and the matrix of domination

In the book “Privilege, Power, and Difference”, I read chapter three entitled Capitalism, Class, and the matrix of domination. This chapter asks the question if race is socially constructed and doesn’t exist otherwise, and human beings don’t have to be afraid of each other then where does racism come from. The book goes on to mention other relative questions about where oppression, hostility, and violence comes from and why did people make it up in the first place. To be able to fully understand the concept of racism you have to know where it comes from and jus how long it has been around. The book says that racism has been around for hardly more than several centuries. Hardly more than three hundred years this in my mind is a very long time. It also states that its appearance in the Europe and American coincided with the expansion of capitalism as an economic system. Capitalism has played a major role in the development of privilege with the main goal of capitalism being to turn money into more money. Capitalism distributes wealth so unequally that the richest ten percent of the U.S. population holds more than two-thirds of all the wealth including ninety percent of cash, and more than ninety percent of business assets meaning stocks and bonds. Finally capitalism plays a major role in surrounding privilege in relation to race and gender. Another statement in the book that was made, said that white men often portray black men as predators and threat towards white women. This creates a dependent position of black men toward white men that leaves them vulnerable of the white man’s control over them .A question that was asked was how to get rid of racism. The only way to get rid of racism is to get rid of the sexism and classism as well, because these are all interconnected in and help to produce one another.
I personally think that capitalism does help reinforce racism. Simply for the fact that since capitalism distributes wealth so unequally many of the people that it affects mostly are races other than white. Privilege can defend or reinforce another form, access to one form can affect access for others, and also access to one form can serve as compensation for not having access to another. Knowing this information I think it would make a lot of sense try and curtail the way we let privilege control society and how it affects everyone.

Chapter 3 - The Giddy Multitude

Chapter three is The Giddy Multitude the hidden origins of slavery. In Ronald Takaki’s book I learned some facts that I had never before heard of. According to the book the first Africans arrived in England around 1554, and they were called Negroes or Caliban. Then we move on to Virginia were some of the first American slaves had went to. In the details that are enclosed in the book we learn that quite a few English people were here in America as indentured servants. The white indentured servants were just those indentured servants, only to work to repay the debt they had made mostly on their voyage to America. People who owned land began to realize that they could make a bigger profit from a black slave, than English indentured servant. The slave trade began by sending African slaves to Virginia. The ones who were already there who were indentured servants status was often changed to work forever. The English and African people were very unhappy with their lives working for the service of others. Many of them hatched plans to escape, and many did but often were caught and severely punished for trying to escape. The white servants were punished less severely than the African slaves. Another problem was that many white people both male and female were having children with African Americans, those who were received punishment for so called violation of racial purity. Even though they were few incidents of this behavior Virginia originally was only made up of two percent of African Americans. The country of Barbados in the same time period, half the population were African slaves. The English at first did not want to operate America in the same fashion not wanting to have a biracial society, and second they were not trying to raise money to go back they instead wanted to permanently settle here in America. They eventually gave in and imported more slaves, even though they were risking the hierarchical society they had began forming. The book also informs us on the life of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a slave owner; he also had a reputation for being a strict disciplinarian of his slaves. We also find evidence that he felt guilty for owning slaves, and wanted to develop a plan to send them back to their land for them to start over again. Basically in the overall summary of this chapter we learn that society with racism was brought to the America from England. W e also learned that white people suffered some but their punishment varied greatly from that of the African Americans.

Zinn- Chapter 2- Drawing The Color Line

In Chapter two of Zinn called drawing the Color Line we learn more about racism and how it became prevalent in America and lasts even until this very day. The question that is asked is whether it is possible for white and black people to live together without hatred? The only way to answer this question is to find out how racism started, and to see if it can be effectively ended. In this chapter it was found that people were not certain whether it was hatred, contempt, or pity, or even patronization which would place black people into an inferior position for three hundred and fifty years. When the English settlers arrived in Jamestown, Virginia the Indians taught them how to grow tobacco they began to sell this product back to England. The settlers need more money, but they did not know how they could possibly do all the work themselves. But they realized that they could not possibly have the Indians work for them simply because they were outnumbered. The thought of capturing the Indians would also not work for the fact that the Indians were too tough, resourceful, defiant, and at home in the wilderness while the English were not. The only possible answer the settlers could find was to have black slaves. By 1619 a million black slaves had already been brought over to South America and the Caribbean from South Africa to work for the Portuguese. Fifty years before Columbus the Portuguese took black people to Lisbon to be sold as slaves. The black people were torn from their cities, were they were discovered to be living in more civilized cities than Europeans at that time. Often slave traders use the excuse that slavery had already existed in Africa. However there were two major differences of slavery in Africa compared to that of the United States. One major difference was they were more like serfs or indentured servants; the second were the use of slaves for limitless profit and racial hatred. The slaves were put in horrible conditions on death marches, slave ships, only one third of the initial captured made it to America, an estimated fifty million of the population of Africa were lost to slavery and death. The slave trade was first done to escape starvation, and possible extinction, but quickly turned into a blind passion of greed. After learning of these events in more in depth detail I think it will take more than people will ever be willing to give to live without racism. African American people have been living in inferiority for so long that many white people, would most likely decline the right to give away their self-prescribed superior status to become equivalent to African Americans.

Race the Power of an Illusion ( Extra Credit)

In class on Monday we watched a movie entitled “Race: The Power of an illusion, Episode 1: The Difference between Us”. The movie we watched explained that for several hundred years we have been classifying people by race, through clear cut categories mostly just by looking at them. It was stated that race assumes that external differences are related to internal racial which gives some a biological competitive edge. The truth is that people are actually not very different outside their external differences, and in fact are genetic make-ups are not very different at all no matter what racial background you are from. Animals from the same background tend to be more distant than humans, with the examples of fruit flies who are ten times more different than each other. During the movie we learned that for two hundred years scientist looked for some type of biological factor that could determine what makes people the racial background that they become. Basically the scientist were searching for anything they could find that could justify putting all the ethnicities of African Americans, Chinese, and Indian all at the bottom of the hierarchy and to place Whites at the very top. In this time the people in the government discovered a racial group called the WIN tribe, which a group of people made up of White, Indian, Negro or African Americans located in West Virginia. The government saw this mixture of races and thought it was disgraceful, in turn after this was discovered some twenty-eight states passed laws to save racial purity. These ideas were later adopted by the leader of the Nazi regime Adolph Hitler. Later with the rise of African American athletes, people were wondering how these athletes could have gotten so good at sports. This also prompted the research of scientists to search for reasons why African American people can be so talented. The reason why people are to have acquired their skin tones was discussed in greater detail, it was stated that people need sunlight to have the necessary amount of vitamin D to produce the right melanin which produces the skin tone. It was also proved that the skin tone was lighter and darker in certain regions to help people be able to survive in their current environments. It was also determined that through MtDNA a set of DNA found in the mitochondria that can only be inherited from your mother, is where people inherit most of their genetic backgrounds that can help people identify from what region of the world their ancestors could came from. It was also determined that the most genetic variation was present in Africa.
In conclusion the racial gap that is supposed to be so wide is actually pretty narrow once you move past an individual’s external skin tone. In actuality people are all very close indeed, and a lot of them originated from most of the same general areas. We also learned that most of the separation that occurs within society is not by biological but rather by social differences created by people who are believe that difference races should determine statuses of the people.

Chapter 2- Privilege, Opression & Difference

I read chapter two of the Privilege Power and Difference. In chapter two the topic of privilege, oppression, and difference are discussed in great length and detail. After reading this chapter I learned the problem that surrounds the term of difference, is really a problem as much as the terms that relate to why people are different such as privilege and power. Difference however is not the problem, the illusion or misunderstood fact is the popular conception is that people are afraid of what they don’t know or understand. In chapter two the topic of the diversity wheel is brought up as an aspect to which we can compare and accurately describe one another to classify people into distinct groups. The different characteristics listed in the hub of the wheel include age, race, ethnicity, gender, physical ability, qualities, and sexual orientation. Around the outer ring others listed are religion, marital and parental status, and social class indicators of education, occupation, and income. It was brought to my attention while reading chapter two that if we change or slight shift are status in the wheel could change peoples lives tremendously. The book states the reason why there is trouble that comes with diversity is not the obvious differences of people from each other, rather the way the world tries to in ways include, exclude, reward, or punish, credit or discredit, elevate or oppress, value or devalue others by their differences. Another detail that is brought to light is that in America is that we only accept two genders in our culture while most accept several, which means if you don’t fit one or the other you are automatically labeled an outsider. A quotation that says “No one was white before they came to America; it took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” (Baldwin 17) This quotation shows that by force and powerful domination against other people, that a group of people who classified themselves as white were able to rise to power and control other groups who they felt were less superior in doing so made the other groups inferior. In turn this type of treatment has lasted until the present day, not in every aspect but is clearly present in our culturally diverse society. In chapter two we also learn that privilege exist when one group has something of value that is denied to other groups because of groups the people belong to, not because of what they didn’t do. This explains the conclusion that privilege is highly associated to what race you are a member of. There are two types of privilege mentioned one types is “unearned entitlements”, which are things with some sort of value that all people should have. The second type is called “conferred dominance”; this step proceeds to go further than the other by giving a clear cut advantage in power to another group. The power of privilege increases the power of others and dominates the rule of others, and in turn it helps increase the level of what is called oppression on the lives of others. Oppression is named in chapter two as being the social conflict that results between privilege and oppressed categories. I believe that privilege can often be used in negative ways for the benefit of only certain people, and it should be reviewed as a term that should not be viewed with such a positive connotation for what it is usually used for is not positive in any way.