Week 11 Reading Response

This week we read three short readings from the reader: "What Happened to Post-racial America" by Simon, "Color-blind Privilege" by Gallagher, and "Refugees of Diversity" by Benjamin. All in all, I found these essays to be enlightening in various different ways about certain ideologies foreign to myself.

The first essay by Roger Simon is called "What Happened to Post-racial America?" and was written nearly a year after the election of Barack Obama. Simon states that the "warm fuzzy" feelings evoked by the presidential election have faded due to the realities of the election and the sentiment in the current United States. The success of Obama has led to an increase in claims that he is "foreign" and "not one of us." These claims appear to me as racially motivated by veiled by questions regarding his citizenship and priorities. Simon breaks down the voting statistics of the last election and find that a majority of white Americans did not vote for Obama. He states that although Obama won the overall vote, "he lost among white voters by 55 percent to 43 percent." Although this figure does not necessarily indicate that these voters are all racist, it does imply that a majority of white voters feel threatened by Obama, as both a biracial man and a Democrat (another interesting statistic that Simon provided pointed out that the last three Democratic presidents did not have a majority of white votes). The suspicion about Obama's nationality is really infuriating to me. And I've heard the suspicion legitimized because Obama, supposedly, "does not look like us." This points not to a "post-racial America" but one in which racist notions and concerns are not implicit but underneath the concerns of the new "tea party" and Fox News.

I really enjoyed the next essay by Charles A. Gallagher titled: "Color-blind Privilege: The Social and Political Functions of Erasing the Color Line in Post-Race America." I enjoyed this article precisely because it was able to outline everything wrong with whites who state that they are "color-blind" and that there are no longer disparities due to race in the U.S. Hearing that someone is "color-blind" when considering the races of others has always been a pet peeve of mine but I have never been able to completely articulate just why it bothers me so much. Yes, it is a discounting of experiences of someone of a different race but I couldn't ever put this in context. Thank you Charles Gallagher for giving me some fuel to use in my next debate with someone that thinks a "color-blind" society is a better society. Some particular ideas that resonated with me from the article: that "color blindness maintains white privilege by negating racial inequality," that color blindness hides white privilege, and that color blindness "erases America's racial hierarchy by implying that social, economic, and political power" are shared by everyone in the U.S. no matter what their background is. Some of the statements that Gallagher quoted shocked me with their ignorance. I highlighted the entire quote attributed to James. Even though he says that he lives in a big house and is able to go to school debt-free, he believes it was solely due to "hard work" by his parents and that anyone can reach his parents' level of success if they work hard enough. This completely discounts other people's experiences and starting points. I assume that he probably didn't have to work throughout high school and was able to maintain high grades because he had more time to devote to his studies. What about those minorities that do not share this starting point? What if they have to "work hard" both in school and in the outside world in order to have a place to live and food to eat? What if there was a determined kid just like James but he had to hold down a part time job in order to help his family out? Would he be able to maintain the same grade point average with less time to study? I think not.

The third reading was by Rich Benjamin and called "Refugees of Diversity" and describes what Benjamin calls "whitopias," new communities made up of primarily white people fleeing the cities and suburbs in search of places that uphold "traditional" values. He is careful to mention that most of the people fleeing the suburbs and cities do so in order to provide a stable place to raise families but that due to these places "perceived whiteness" they imply other down-home family-type values such as cleanliness, friendliness, and low crime. Benjamin also talks about the idea of a "post-racial America" and uses these whitopias as a counter-point to the place of race in the U.S. It's interesting that many Americans, as Benjamin points out, associate community-based small towns as primarily white without even really thinking about it. What is it about whiteness that presumes "order, cleanliness, friendliness, and safety"? Why do we have these prejudices?