Toward a Color Blind America: Nope.

Slavery, emancipation, Jim Crowe, The Civil Rights Movement. Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray. Does race matter in 2015? Yes. Sociology helps us to understand the systematic ways in which racism impacts the every day realities of all people. Further, this sociological view offers concrete and abstract ways to combat discrimination and oppression. In this blog, I will briefly discuss why race matters in 21st Century America and then use the documentary The House I Live In to highlight two concrete ways in which racism is prevalent.

Lynching are often associated with the Jim Crow Era in the Deep South, but lynchings were taking place well into the 20th Century, this one in Duluth, Minnesota, 1920.

The shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, highlights racial tensions in contemporary America. The facts of the incident are important in the arch of justice, but no matter the outcome, the protests and media coverage of the incident, and the centrality of race in the discussion about Ferguson, highlight that “race” as a identity component is indeed alive and well. Moreover, that America remains highly segregated is evidence that race matters. Massey and Denton (2014/[1993]) write that, in 1980, Black Americans, no matter their income, still lived separately from their white counterparts. Moreover, in 1976—over a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—72 percent of white respondents said they would feel living in a majority Black neighborhood; 84 percent said that they would not move to such a neighborhood. Segregation is not a matter of preference, but is driven by structural impediments that sustain it. Yes, race matters.

This legacy of residential segregation—structural and sociohistorical frameworks that keep minorities

Protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown.

living “on the wrong side of the tracks” and whites on the “right side of the tracks”—lives on in the 21st Century. In The House I Live In, entire local economies are rooted in drug trafficking and addiction. Because there are no other jobs—retailers and other businesses avoid these neighborhoods—residents often turn to selling drugs, even if they are not users themselves, to make a living wage, often to support their families. Further, we learn in the documentary that laws prevent those with felony records from living in public housing, accessing most employment, and from receiving federal student loans. Essentially, the legal system banishes those with a felony on their record to isolation and the black market.

Moreover, the way in which the law is constructed further highlights the notion that those in power have viewed drug use among minorities as “dangerous,” while many wealthy urbanites have long used pure cocaine as a party favor. Those who possessed crack cocaine, until only recently, were treated far more harshly than those who possessed its purer, more expensive unprocessed counterpart: powder cocaine. Crack cocaine was a known staple in poor, primarily black neighborhood at the height of the war in drugs in the 1980s. Together with revised policing procedures, the mass incarceration project in the United States has disproportionately affected Black Americans—and does nothing to improve life for those who live in Black neighborhoods.

Day 6 of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of Michael Brown.

W.E.B. DuBois essentializes what it feels like—and what it means—to be black in the Jim Crowe era (circa 1900). These sentiments are enduring, as we read in other major works as other authors have documented, including Studs Terkel, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou. And, as Gwen Chi points out in her ten lessons on race: discrimination no longer means segregated restaurants, but an insidious (and sometimes obvious) culture that reproduces racism—that tells black children they are worth less and less desirable than their white counterparts. Meanwhile, privilege is reproduced in and through white families and cultures dominant cultural themes. These feelings of being a “problem” live on because of socialization and quiet racism.

Your task this week to capture race in your own community. Think about the layout of your town/city. What is the “good” part of town? What is the “bad” part of town? And who (which race: minority or white) lives in these respective neighborhoods? Is your community residentially segregated? Find evidence of such a segregation by venturing out into your community and using two photos to demonstrate racial differences. In your caption, name the place and town in the picture and where other races live. For example, when considering Boston, one might say, “Jamaica Plains, Boston: This area has a high proportion of minorities compared to Cambridge or the South End.” Although it’s not required, you can improve the quality of your tweet by providing statistics (use American Fact Finder on the Internet) to back up your claim. In your reply tweets, name one way in which the segregation in the photo impacts daily social life for minorities in the pictured neighborhood.