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Politics and Activism

Sociology: White Spaces Recognized

The infatuation of colorblindness transformed into classifications through time and space.

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Sociology: White Spaces Recognized
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The black space is racially such and the white space is homogenous which promotes confusion between race and class. This is pointed out through the environment that these spaces function around, which would be this urban ghetto concept that is occupied only by one race. This targets social organizations that include workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, and universities and makes the racially diverse.

Whites were in fear that their own rights were at jeopardy when the thought of equal rights with blacks were presented. What we failed to understand was that it is simply a greater group of people that are then presented with the opportunity to be treated as a whole, not two separate units. The assumed privileges we thought we had were something we thought we had over another race, a race that we stigmatized into an environment that we blindly cannot get them out of. The marginalized white space is created and it doesn’t feel culturally right for blacks to be there for how we instinctively make them feel and how we violate a space with our own presumptions. These situations are seen as uncomfortable for blacks because they are is blindly white dominated. We classify them into categories through ethnicity and social class, just as they interpret our judgement as homogeneous. Black people are required to work through the white space because their existence has given them no other choice, as we gave, through making all environments a comfortable white space.

The black space was established thought history beginning with slavery and racial segregation. It makes me think of Gilbert’s social psychology of criminalization approach in why police kill black males with impunity. He talks of how the psychological research shows that whites superhumanize backs and I think that that is because we see them as some sort of super natural or extraordinarily physical character that we gained the perspective of from the past. I believe we relate this to slavery and how they were seen as materialistic objects used toward the jobs that we needed done, an attribution toward the stereotype we place on their physical and psychological being.

There have been upsides to how far we have come from the point of slavery though. They have upgraded in their ways of living and in employment. They have surpassed the black boundaries through status and evolution of the times when it came to being a part of a community. However they do operate on margins that are between the ghetto and the wider white society, which is the gap between cultures. Which is where they do struggle with employment and welfare. We fail to realize how bad they may have it and how it’s not their fault being in the boundaries that we have blindly placed them in. We do this because we view and asses while ignoring impacts of structural poverty and racism on the inner city ghetto perspective. Also, the media encourages the universally low opinion of blacks. This serves as the point where prejudice, source of stereotypes, rationalization for discrimination against blacks comes into play. It encourages a black stereotype where we perceive blacks through the way a small amount of them are portrayed in that media. “In other words, whites and others often stigmatize anonymous black persons by associating them with the putative danger, crime, and poverty of the iconic ghetto, typically leaving blacks with much to prove before being able to establish trusting relations with them.” (Anderson p.13 "The White Space.")

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