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Blog #4 - Victor Rios

In Black Teacher: White School H. Richard Milner describes the hegemonic undercurrent that Black teachers face when entering White majority schools. Key to his discussion are the concepts of Disruptive Movement Theory and expectations. The former is a theory and praxis attempting to crucially disrupt cultural and economic factors that maintain Whiteness as dominant. Expectations, as a word, is vague and benign, but the consistency to which the author uses it exemplifies its significance from a sociocultural standpoint. All body paragraphs center cultural expectations in describing the effects and consequences Black teachers are challenged with, both from the interpersonal educational experience and larger system. Aspects include being asked to do more “invisible work” being asked to essentially to fix Black interpersonal problems that that have racialized systemic roots for no financial compensation, coinciding with the assumption that since they are Black they have “expertise” on interpersonal interracial Black relations, and encountering overwhelming pressures to maintain the status quo. The paper concludes with an encouragement to disrupt these expectations and material conditions, explaining that it is as important, if not more, that White members of the community work to take actions that disrupt hegemonic Whiteness. Important to note is that inclusion, beyond a Civil Rights end-all be-all conclusion of racist ideology, is to build spaces that furthermore support and maintain Black spaces within White spaces. “In short, either educators are working against oppression or they [are] working to maintain it.” (pg. 401) Words influenced by Paulo Friere, the message speaks towards the dichotomous relationship between hegemonic expectations of education/learning and disrupting said expectations. This stems theoretically from the understanding that racism and race relations are built in functions of the system, working to stratify communities and larger populations as maintenance of social hierarchy and currents of economic distribution. Therefore, educators, consciously or not, are either serving a system with built in racism, or disrupting it. It is critical to understand that inclusion is a crucial initial step, but resources and timely material and emotional support are necessary to disrupt White hegemony - a person with wisdom may be able to build a house, but without materials, assistance, and time, it will fail to manifest.

Black Food Geographies by Ashanté M. Reese is an analysis of the food systems of the predominantly Black neighborhood Deanwood, located on the northside of Washington D.C.. It further examines a comparative and connecting exploration of nearby affluent Black neighborhoods and national events, respectively, as means of bringing context to the local historical situation of Deanwood. Key to the author’s discussion are the concepts of food apartheid and self-reliance. The former is a semantic tool created by anti-racist activists encouraged by Reese which wishes to overwrite the idea of “food desert,” both of which take geographical looks at how food and access to such is unequally distributed across the US. However, she bolsters the concept of “food apartheid” over “food desert” explaining that food apartheid is more encompassing and thought provoking due to its inclusion of race relations to food distribution. Self-reliance refers to local-community built social and economic structures that grant Black bodies more autonomy and self-determination, in this case, referring to food creation and distribution as means of providing for self in an exclusionary system. Reese leads into a historical look through different methodologies that highlight complexities curating both food apartheid and the ideology of self-reliance, correlating to growth of the larger system and ideas of community through the grocery store. In the early 20th Century, “hucksters” (individuals who engage in small trade) provided a small-scale informal economy that provided a backbone for a community that was neglected by the larger food system. Alongside hucksters, Southern Black farmers moved into Deanwood for better financial prospects, whilst carrying agricultural wisdom that allowed for small scale food and crop growth. Here the importance of land ownership is highlighted, analyzing the relationship between self-determination of food access and owning a plot of land. As the century moved along, Jewish migrants took advantage of credit-based food distribution and access to spaces that were aesthetically correlated with grocery stores, undercutting Black-owned business. Large supermarket chains also moved in, disenfranchising Black-owned food businesses further, simultaneously creating conditions that other small retail and drug businesses came to rely on for foot traffic. Social justice rioting and protesting in the latter half of the 20th Century was used to excuse large businesses for moving out of predominantly Black neighborhoods, taking both access to food and foot traffic from the communities it once served. Here we can see how larger social interactions created “food apartheid,” as systems that Deanwood relied on were constantly subject to change and corporate movements, which left a once semi-self sufficient neighborhood dried out of life chances and upward mobility. The ideal of self-reliance comes into question as a result; Is self-reliance feasible when a larger system of corporation and governance actively works against Black communities such as Deanwood? Deanwood’s small scale food distribution systems were easily exploited by the credit-based system employed by Jewish businesses, who utilized a banking system that preferred loans for one race over the other while simultaneously taking advantage of low income residents who needed to make ends meet. Corporations took a monopoly over food distribution networks, again supported by a larger system that worked in their favor, and had determining actions over the community when they decided to follow a wealthier white crowd. These events would suggest that restructuring, or more likely, revolution of the system has more determination in the autonomy of Black bodies than simply only providing for self. 

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Blog #3

Victor Rios

Blog #3

Condemnation of Blackness observes racial developments in crime and crime statistics produced from the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. The author, Khalil Mohummand, points to a variety of social scientists that produce or critique the praxis of racialized crime fighting. He furthermore questions the logic around manufactured racial stereotypes and the rationalization process behind viewing these stereotypes as scientific evidence. In that, he connects various discourses and law enforcement practices to the historical criminalization of Black people. Key concepts to the author's discussion are racialized policing and data statistics, noting that the two relations are interconnected. Racialized policing is the practice, intentional or not, of policing people based on their race. Data statistics are used to justify this policing, specifically the use of stratified crime statistics and census data on prison population. The combined use of policing and stats feed on each other through a vicious cycle of profiling, arresting, and justification of these actions through crime data, which of course is inflated because of profiling and arrests. The New York City “Stop and Frisk” policy is one of the most outright examples of this, a practice imposed by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in which police target “suspicious individuals” and subject them to a pat down. An investigation into the police department showed that non-whites were almost 90% of those subjected to this practice, an obvious highlight as to who were the intended targets of this practice. Crucially, it is important to note that this practice, along with many other laws produced following the fall of legalized Jim Crow, were claimed to be “colorblind”; essentially they were ideologically neutral when it came to laws based on race. Giuliani defended the stop and frisk policy by saying that “we place police where the crime is, we aren’t racist we are following statistics” a short-sighted rhetoric that refuses to observe the relationship between racial policing and crime statistics. 

9102000 observes the 13th Amendment, specifically on how it transformed chattel-slavery into the Prison-Industrial Complex by providing law/code as its written, the practices that follow, and the function criminality provides for the state/private sector. To start the paper, the author highlights the first two sections of the 13th Amendment, where it is written in code that slavery is illegal unless the individual is a felon. He further argues that consequences of the 13th Amendment resulted in the use of prisoners to benefit private and public projects alike. Key concepts in this discussion are industry and incarceration rates, both of which I argue have built a reliance on each other that has been coined the Prison-Industrial Complex. That is to say that the use of the incarcerated function to supply labor for both private and state industrial purposes, from building railroads, providing steel, to road improvement projects. The Chattel Slave system provided a cheap source of labor that provided massive amounts of wealth accumulation for the American South, and further the American economy as a whole. The abolishment of slavery, in turn, created the Prison Industrial Complex as means of maintaining the economic structure and expansion of the industrializing United States. The reading provides the statistics of what is produced just from the New York Correctional system, highlighting a cog operating within the incarceration system of the larger United States. Industry benefits from the subverted slave system that is the prison system by receiving cheap labor subsidized by the state. By coding the law to appear as color neutral, while maintaining the larger oppressive modes of incarceration through economic suffering paired with punishment for economic suffering coated in racial biases, result in the mass incarceration of poor and Black populations to provide the function of cheap labor for the US marketplace. 

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Blog #3

Victor Rios

Blog #3

Condemnation of Blackness observes racial developments in crime and crime statistics produced from the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. The author, Khalil Mohummand, points to a variety of social scientists that produce or critique the praxis of racialized crime fighting. He furthermore questions the logic around manufactured racial stereotypes and the rationalization process behind viewing these stereotypes as scientific evidence. In that, he connects various discourses and law enforcement practices to the historical criminalization of Black people. Key concepts to the author's discussion are racialized policing and data statistics, noting that the two relations are interconnected. Racialized policing is the practice, intentional or not, of policing people based on their race. Data statistics are used to justify this policing, specifically the use of stratified crime statistics and census data on prison population. The combined use of policing and stats feed on each other through a vicious cycle of profiling, arresting, and justification of these actions through crime data, which of course is inflated because of profiling and arrests. The New York City “Stop and Frisk” policy is one of the most outright examples of this, a practice imposed by former Mayor Rudi Juliani in which police target “suspicious individuals” and subject them to a pat down. An investigation into the police department showed that non-whites were almost 90% of those subjected to this practice, an obvious highlight as to who were the intended targets of this practice. Crucially, it is important to note that this practice, along with many other laws produced following the fall of legalized Jim Crow, were claimed to be “colorblind”; essentially they were ideologically neutral when it came to laws based on race. Juliani defended the stop and frisk policy by saying that “we place police where the crime is, we aren’t racist we are following statistics” a short-sighted rhetoric that refuses to observe the relationship between racial policing and crime statistics. 

9102000 observes the 13th Amendment, specifically on how it transformed chattel-slavery into the Prison-Industrial Complex by providing law/code as its written, the practices that follow, and the function criminality provides for the state/private sector. To start the paper, the author highlights the first two sections of the 13th Amendment, where it is written in code that slavery is illegal unless the individual is a felon. He further argues that consequences of the 13th Amendment resulted in the use of prisoners to benefit private and public projects alike. Key concepts in this discussion are industry and incarceration rates, both of which I argue have built a reliance on each other that has been coined the Prison-Industrial Complex. That is to say that the use of the incarcerated function to supply labor for both private and state industrial purposes, from building railroads, providing steel, to road improvement projects. The Chattel Slave system provided a cheap source of labor that provided massive amounts of wealth accumulation for the American South, and further the American economy as a whole. The abolishment of slavery, in turn, created the Prison Industrial Complex as means of maintaining the economic structure and expansion of the industrializing United States. The reading provides the statistics of what is produced just from the New York Correctional system, highlighting a cog operating within the incarceration system of the larger United States. Industry benefits from the subverted slave system that is the prison system by recieving cheap labor subsidized by the state. By coding the law to appear as color neutral, while maintaining the larger oppressive modes of incarceration through economic suffering paired with punishment for economic suffering coated in racial biases, result in the mass incarceration of poor and Black populations to provide the function of cheap labor for the US marketplace. 

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Blog #2 BLST

Victor Rios

Blog #2

WC: 911 Dominant cultural ideology in the United States is a core enabler in legitimizing racism into codified law. The reading, America on Film, explores the channels through which such ideology comes about and is reproduced. Following the paper's introduction, it explores the ideologies produced from the genesis of the United States government, highlighting the Constitution's claim of “We the People.” This statement has been a point of contention from its birth, with  cultural, political, social, and economic disputes about exactly who this is considered to represent. Although the founding of the United States was supposedly a government of the people for the people, the creation of the constitution only granted rights to land owning white males. This exemplifies the creation of the United States was not a creation of a government represented by individuals, but a government created, fostered, and administered by the hegemonic elite. This is crucial to understand, because the historical consequences produced show that the law, economic practice, political structuring, governmental administration, and various aspects of social control were rooted from the perspective and administration of rich white men. To state the obvious, the codified law about who can vote has expanded with the ideal that We the People is supposed to represent more than just the white male. However, the colonial ideology that our society is built on has all but faded, and like water, it finds a way to trickle down through the cracks and canals of the American collective conscious during this historical continuum. That is to say colonial ideologies about race and societal structuring, although not as apparent as codified laws placing white people as the outright champions of the human race, still exist in a morphed form, with pressures from above (the hegemonic elite) ensuring that ideologies they benefit from stay intact. Crucial to this statement is the understanding that the creation of race and the stratification used to bolster an ideological racial segregation entirely benefits those who create said race creation. This is because the creation and separation of race lays the ground for the dehumanization process that subsequently occurs, which gives the hegemonic elite a myriad of tools and ideological backing to exploit the non white. America on Film observes how hegemonic cultural values produce film and art that are not only representative of a racist society, but even further, reproduces ideology that maintains the contemporary social order of race and wealth distribution. As discussed in class, many aspects go into the creation of something such as a film, from the basics of camera angle and use of language, to the smaller subliminal messages like set design and musical underscore. For instance, many American produced movies put a deep yellow/redish shadow when the set is placed in a Latin American country, typically Mexico. When exemplifying Black people, they are typically shown as the perceived stereotypes, i.e. big round noses, buck teeth, shown to be in positions of subservience, shown on a binary of either being extremely lazy or happy to do menial work, etc. With the latter example, it is typical that the stereotypes are shown in correlation with the contemporary prejudices and beliefs. Moving deeper than just the messages produced, the tandemized reaction of civil society produces cultural beliefs that allow for actions of hate and violence. For instance, The Birth of A Nation was a film produced in the early years of the 20th Century, which acts as somewhat of a biography of the Ku Klux Klan, which has a scene of a man in black face running from the “heroic” Klan members, leading to his lynching. This film is a prime example of the relationship and consequences of racist ideology being bolstered through art. It was shown in the White House for President Woodrow Wilson and a small audience of friends and family, exemplifying its popularity at the time. Furthermore, the movie acted as a significant historical occurrence by single-handedly reinvigorating the Ku Klux Klan, which had essentially become diminished. The representation of a Black man in this movie led to mass brutality and social repercussions against the mass population of Black people. Uncoincidently, this came from a society that was experiencing Jim Crow, laws that purposefully separated white and non white, actively producing racial discrimination and furthermore codified racemaking as natural and moral. Ironically, as explored in The Geopolitics of Jim Crow, these laws were supposedly implemented for the betterment of both races, with the idea of “they stay over there with their culture and practices, and we will stay over here with our culture and practices.” Dominant ideology saw the “Black race” as a parasite, or as author Rudyard Kipling put it: “The White Man’s Burden.” White people, ideologically, were “more fit” for the fruits of society, from various life chances to economic prosperity; it belonged to the white man and the non white would just have to learn and assimilate to be more like the white man if they wanted to enjoy the same amenities. This legitimized the spatial treatment of Black people, from the creation of the inner-city, the coinciding redlining practices, intentionally created economic stagnation that immobilized movement of Black populations, the omission from benefits created by the New Deal and GI Bill (which essentially kept the poor Black population in a subservient position of the white elite, specifically as exploited farmhands in the South,) and the violence/policing that ensured Black people “stayed in their place”; i.e. sundown towns.

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BLST BIWEEKLY #1

Victor Rios

WC:678 

The first paper discusses the ongoing ramifications of the historical events produced from colonization, and an analysis of the contemporary interactionism between a given actor and the greater society. Key to this paper is discussion on the formation of race and gender as we know it today, which dives into a discourse that further deepens our collective understanding of the “racemaking” spoken in class. Center to the historical occurrence of colonization from the perspective of the settler was the ideological rationalization of a somewhat “Godliness,” later “evolutionarily advantageousness,” that justified settler colonization not just as fine, but as if it were written in the stars forged by hallucination of progress. There is discussion differentiating colonization patterns, one of classical colonization; in which a state or group of governance uses a satellite state to parasitically usurp resources for benefit of the “haves” within the given colonial state. Settler colonization, on the other hand, is the practice of not only usurping resources, but using the land as means of habitat and social reproduction. The author argues that these are two distinct occurrences, both in deservance of a respective theoretical framework. The latter, I would argue, involves deeper sociological implications for the host region in which there is a historical pattern that involves a process of primitive accumulation, dehumanization, and typically dissemination of both the host population and its very way of life. However, there is little to no critique on capitalism nor the implications and logics derived from its historical and contemporary presence. With no discussion of the rules and reproduction of capitalism, the paper removes historical accuracy from the reader by not fully fleshing out the actualization and legalization of occurrences like colonization and its subsequent creation of the very “whiteness/non-whiteness” dichotomy it attempts to critique. Removal of profit incentive from the discussion leaves the social issues we discuss as a matter of ideological perspective rather than a built in production to serve the capitalist system, which does not do much in terms of theoretically challenging racism at its roots, rather just trims the bushes from the leaves produced. That is not to say the paper does not hold critical discussion points backed with empirical evidence, rather does not incorporate the logic that creates the conditions in which law,  a gun, and a culture exists that uses racism as a justification to reproduce.  Pivoting from that, we can also criticize the second paper for following a similar path of ideological hypothesizing, rather than both a critique on the greater economic system and tandem ideologies. However, an olive branch can be extended to the fact that the paper is a summarization of critical race theory, and attempts a discussion of “what is” rather than “how to.” Key to the discourse of this paper is the idea of “microaggressions.” Microaggressions are defined as an action that subtly reinforces racism, such as holding your bag tighter when walking past a Black man, or making depictions of all Asian people as yellow. The implications of microaggressions go to generating a perceived ideological difference, which can allow for the conditions of social control and unjust governance. Center to both papers was discussion on the importance of self determination, which supposedly could give oppressed populations the ability to break the chains that bind them. A just and fair demand, but here again is why it is important to have discussion of the greater capitalist system. An analysis of such would reveal that the functionalist aspects of capitalism require oppressed and disempowered populations to serve as surplus for the hegemonic elite, something that roots deeper than just the ideology of a given civil society; in this case the white American. Furthermore, it would be revealed that the racism experienced today is very much a causation from the previous statement. To trudge along, it is still important to give value to ideas and theories produced by CRT, and highlight the importance of having the tools of language such as “microaggressions,” which our professor was able to use to help make sense of his own world, in reference to the anecdote shared in class.