Race

      Race is defined as a "socially constructed category of people who share biologically transmitted traits that members of a society consider important". Not only does this definition state that race is a social construct, but it recognizes that the way we do that, is by giving race so much importance and power over how we define someone. At first I thought that there had to be some type of biological aspect if we were to give it that much importance, but I was left to find that so many people use this claim that race is biological, to justify the inequalities based on race. Throughout this  unit I have learned that people in power have taken advantage of the vulnerable, which in this case is the people of color, to further their own personal agendas. In order for someone to have power, someone else has to have less and race is a great example of this. But since being outwardly racist is no longer accepted as we saw in the 'New Jim Crow', people in power have to find subtle ways to discriminate based on race, but by calling it something else, like tough on crime, it is then accepted and the oppression continues. To start I think that race is socially constructed through the media and it starts by taking the humanity away from the people of color in order to make it easier for everyone to not have compassion for them and see people of color as the problem that everyone has to defend themselves against. When your instilled with the messages that people of color are innately inferior, you no longer see POC as human and it's easier to see them have their rights being taken way and see it as justifiable because they're inferior, but the idea of pigment being used as a basis for inferiority is a reality we, as a society have created. As was seen in the documentary. the 13th, the media over represents black people as criminals  and then when we label someone a criminal, we " discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans". This representation of POC, specifically African americans as savages makes inequalities justifiable and correlates this idea of 'whiteness' with superiority. Another significant factor with how race is socially constructed are the institutions and the structures we put in place in our society that keep POC down. The criminal justice system being one of them, but not the only one, it all comes down to an unequal distribution of power and resources. Obviously there are intersections between social class and race, but by creating more disadvantages for people of color through denying the same access to education, healthcare, housing and jobs, you validate the mindset that is used to gain from racism. The mindset that has opportunities and advantages because of inherited privilege and then when they succeed they call it effort. The mindset that see's any one else's inability to succeed as a lack of effort and doesn't take into consideration the disadvantages they were born into. Adding on, the way people of color are represented on tv shows has a huge role because of the endless hours people spend sitting in front of a tv absorbing messages and   further developing biases and stereotypes. Through the activity of race and media I came to realize that we give writers who write these shows the power to depict the mannerisms of people of color and white people and when someone's only representation of a POC is a misrepresentation from the media, then a stereotype becomes their beliefs. I think the affect of this can be shown by simply showing the state of our country and how our current leadership has forged it's success on this hatred of minorities and validation of inferiority.
         Overall, learning about race and the criminal justice system has only deepened the importance of  a sociological imagination for me, because it just shows how the problems we face daily are deeply connected with what our world values  and the means they go to get it. For example, the problem of discrimination against people of color is connected to how people in power value money and increasing their power , specifically the people who gain from having free labor through the incarceration systems and go to extreme means to associate being bad or a criminal with  being a person of color, in order to get more people of color in their jails working for free and thus boosting their power. In one of our first documents called the sociological imagination claimed that " It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self and to see the relations between the two" and I think this is like the connection of our criminal system to the devaluation a person of color faces. I also have came to a realization that the what we call reality and what we see as truth is something that we construct, through the help of society, whether it's through media,family, peers or school, if you don't question or are aware of the messages that are being instilled in you, then your perspective is not your own, but what society has deemed it to be. I think that that also plays into what the solution to these problems of race and racial inequality are, which is questioning those preconceived notions of people of color based on constructions imposed from the outside. I think a start would be to recognize you may have an implicit bias towards black people as bad and to try and contest that bias and look at more successful and good black people to form a new association. As soon as we start seeing people of color as humans and not savages then despite media and societal structures, we will not only take what society is trying to tell us about people of color and see it as truth. Then soon after this false reality we created is questioned then we will soon find the people in power being replaced with people with this new questioning mindset and our societal racism will be deconstructed.