The main ideas in the readings and the film are power, profile, racism, and race capitalism in America. Scholars such as Fraser, Zinn, Dunbar-Ortiz, and Kelley talk about how the native people were being violently driven out of their land and resources by the European colonizers to form a racist capitalist system that has categories of races as the basis and white supremacy as the ideal. Bonilla-Silva’s brilliant piece shows the complexities behind colour-blind racism and white privilege issues. Even in the misguided notions of a “racial equal society,” they are still everywhere. “White Like Me” documentary offers new insight into public policy practices that constructed the concept of racial entitlement and meritocracy of an “American Dream” country image. The racial principle of capitalism is to exploit and, at the same time, withdraw the resources of marginalized racial groups that continue to be used as an instrument of creating white privilege between racial groups inequality.
Fraser (2019) accurately points out the difference between exploitation and appropriation in thoracal capitalism. Harassment represents the mineral of surplus value from labour, whereas the transmitter presupposes the violent removal of possessions and properties from oppressed peoples. Fraser goes even further: while capital accumulation has, historically speaking, been predominantly based on exploitation, recently, there has been a reemergence of expropriation much to the detriment of “blacks, browns, and indigenous peoples” (p. From “dispossession of lands, extortionate credit practices, foreclosures, and misplacing the poor with overpriced household and services commodities as well as the issues of racism shoving some into prisons for labor manipulation” (p. 7), she makes known these to be the recent means of exploitation faced by the marginalized communities of colour. From the separation of two critical modes of operation in this racial capitalism, she allows us to highlight how this very practice has expanded over the recent decades to include the rise of ATM policies under neoliberalism, whose target is minority groups.
From the inception of European colonialism, which began with the dispossession of the indigenous peoples from their lands and means of subsistence, the historical roots of racial capitalism have been highly dominant. Here, in the chapter titled “The Conquest Begins”, Zinn provides, for instance, the enslavement of aboriginals by Columbus and the commandeering of harvests by the Puritans, which partly underlies the settlers’ colonial takeover. Dunbar-Ortiz (2018 shows how the notions of white supremacy were built to legitimize the violence of Rome against the Celts, which eventually led to the subjugation of the descendants of the Celts by the Romans. In her article (Kelley, 2018), she clearly shows that the ‘expulsion of natives’ is all the more absurd considering the centuries of diversity, racial mixing and cultural encounters. Such narratives of racial superiority, together with claims of nationhood, emerged after these were strategically designed and then deployed to justify colonial domination and appropriation of racialized “others”. Thus, racial capitalism grew during earlier days as a system of these two conceits: first of all, to violently extract resources from the individuals declared as marginalized, and secondly, with the production of regimes of truth about how the colonized were rac
The main ideas of the writings by Cox, 1987, and McWhorter, 2004, are that the authors reveal the social construction of race and the category of races itself. We discover examples of societies where nobody was inferior due to skicolouror, but such a naturagreaterer is merely an illusion. McWhorter does not just rely on Foucaldian practices but uses them to show how race and sex are relatively recent, “unnatural” groups which emerged just recently with our biopower system. Foucault’s biopolitics theories are well-informed and account for the genesis of two factors used to establish a taxonomy of humans, which included racial and sexual ranking used for human differentiation and suppression. ‘Race’ and ‘sex’ become the results of the power technologies that are used on purpose to define disorderly, threatening and not valuable social groups and to control society. By denaturalizing race, these works expose how racial categorization was a political project central to instantiating the systems of domination and expropriation that racial capitalism upon denaturalizing race, these works expose how racial categorization was a political project central to instantiating the systems of domination and expropriation that racial capitalism depends upon.:
Bonilla-Silva’s work, in particular, reveals that biased attitudes among whites, which advocate for a colour-blind society, paradoxically, have become their way of reaffirming their white privilege in modern America. Haidt identifies some of the main mechanisms used by whites to justify racial inequalities through abstract liberalism, natural perception of racial phenomena, and minority blame frames in “Peeking Inside ‘White House of Colorblindness'” (2006). For instance, “racial progressives” declared competing notions (not only colour blindness is an accepted but a fostered approach if you want to become a member of the community), and even the spotless Archies have not avoided the rules of socially accepted colour blindness. Based on Freidrichs Bonilla-Silvas’s (2020) argument, foundations for such colourblindness allow the denying of systematic racism to persist during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was discrimination in the society regardless that the African Americans and Hispanics were more vulnerable, but the systemic racism was blamed on the community instead. They show that the racial privilege of whites is not a result of categorically blatant racism but Liberal ideas that only mask and form structural racial disparities and disadvantages.
The documentary “White Like Me” gives a strong example of many course concepts, such as social capital and white privilege, in the narrative of race and capitalism. Government programs like redlining, restrictive housing covenants, and the GI Bill robbed the Black communities (Fraser, 2019) of the opportunities to build and enjoy wealth at the same time that the government thrived economically by subsidizing the wealthy white middle-class growth. The movie Deconstruction of a Racial Meritocracy focuses on the myth of meritocracy (Bonilla-Silva, 2006) by underlining the legacy of white privilege which ruling. However, Wise indicates that the refusal of whites to see historically established equality and current persisting white racial privilege (Kelley, 2018) develops kinds of anger towards equal justice initiatives. It is through this conceptualization of whiteness that the significant themes of dispossession, the socialization of race through invented mythology, and the discursive mask of colour-blind racism are illuminated.
Being a kid of the wheat who grew up in an ethnically diverse urban area, I have noticed how the legacy of proletarianization continues to be experienced in the form of concentrated poverty and disinvestment in certain parts of the city. Whole segments of communities switched to a stratum of society artificially accentuated by racism in redlining, predatory lending and transferring of the sources to other sectors of society and not the minority markets – which is Fraser’s observation. While McWhorter is talking about race and prisons, I happen to witness it all with prison labour doing all the heavy lifting taken on by young males of African descent. However, the popular narratives encouraged by the price of Kelley’s art show reflected his criticism of these crooked cultural patterns brought by wealthier and white residents. They attributed this state of affairs to a rigid racial culture, which meant that becoming rich and black was not a wise choice. The portrayal by Zinn of how the colonizers originally forcefully pushed the local occupants away makes it clear that these contemporary injustices were just the most recent embodiments of racial capitalism where the oppressive dynamics are perpetuated. Through our text analysis, I understood how enclosing community land leads to accumulation, referring to one generation after another.
The art shows the mode of oppression, which involves gaining exploitative resources from the poor, marginalized groups that are mapped down to the most profound ‘asin-ness’ through racial myths that scientists created. This colonization often occurs through the narratives of an imaginary racial nation, which is then imposed on people of diverse origins. The tradition of white privilege is implicit, i.e. history,ry, wherein the denial of earned privileges of white people to Colored people is used to make white benefits normal and undisputed. This type of a system that builds on each other through expropriation, fictitious racial identity, mythic nationality and Mainstream White Privilege is self-perpetuating, with economic, governmental and epistemological oppression and exploitation passing as a conventional thing. Disentangling the pyramid of racism through its legends, at its foundation, is just one of the necessary steps towards overcoming the negative influence of racial capitalism.
References
Cox, O. C. (1987). “Race Relations: Its Meaning, Beginning, and Progress.” In Hunter, Herbert M., and Sameer Y. Abraham (eds.), Race, Class, and the World System: The Sociology of Oliver C. Cox, pp. 96–103. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Fraser, N. (2019). “Is Capitalism Necessarily Racist?” Politics/Letters 15.
McWhorter, L. (2004). “Sex, Race, and Biopower: A Foucauldian Genealogy.” Hypatia 19(3): 38-62.
Zinn, H. (2015). A People’s History of the United States. Routledge. Chapter 1, “Columbus Indians and Human Progress.”
Kelley, R. D. G. (2018). “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2018. “What White Supremacists Know.” Boston Review.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2006. “Peeking Inside the (White) House of Colorblindness.” Chapter 6 in Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2006. “Are All Whites Refined Archie Bunkers? An Examination of White Racial Progressives.” Chapter 7 in Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2020. “Color-Blind Racism in Pandemic Times.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, July. DOI: Jul 31:2332649220941024:1-12
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