GroupMe

  Late Night Show with Larry Wilmore - GroupMe App Segment   

   Racism runs rampant even in today's day and age. Years of reformation and institutional changes have brought people closer, but there is still institutionalized racism in society. Whether it is common lingo, movies, tv shows, websites - racism appears everywhere. We discussed this week in class the new forms of racial stereotyping and racial fueled stigma through phone applications. One application we discussed was "SketchFactor" which allows for individuals in public to openly post about "sketchy" citizens in public. While there were no racial implications behind the application, the application fueled a racial frenzy. Over 3/4ths of the accused in the application were black, showing that racism is still alive and well. This isn't the only application which has triggered the same reaction. 

   In perfect correlation with our class discussion on Monday, On the Late Night Show with Larry Wilmore (from this week), his panel discussed the phone application "GroupMe" which allows for shop keepers to post about sketchy people shopping in their store. It is an alert system which can be looked at by the general public, and again the majority of those accused were black. Many people strive for the feeling of security, but these anonymous applications wont secure zones, but merely enforce violence and hatred of people based off of stereotypes. The reason why racial violence declined was not only because of the civil rights movement, but also because as a nation we were globalizing. Globalizing meant migrations of people from North to South, East to West. People of color were living amongst whites, and where whites had been able to support racial fueled violence they now had to face those who they "hated." That doesn't mean racism was removed, it just meant there was more consequence for racial fueled actions.  Anonymity was removed, thus reducing violence because of face to face situations. Anonymity is a terrible concept and allows people to openly hate without consequence. Accountability is everything. 

   While many of these applications did not foresee racial profiling, it is something we cannot stop. In order to contain that though, we need to remove the anonymity of these applications so people can be held accountable for their profiling. It will be very interesting to see the progression of these apps and see if they catch on across the nation since most of them are only in localized areas. 

BlogPost#2

Race, Crime and Punishment in our society has caused many to approach this system in many different ways. Why... For this week in class, we had the article, Surveillance of "suspicious blacks" which was in the neighborhood of rich whites who lived near some blacks.  This article can be a tool to help people understand the people of Georgetown, especially the interactions that whites have towards blacks day in and day out.  In this article, there are severe differences between blacks and whites, but blacks(colored people) are always going to be feared in whites eyes because the differentiation of norms, having to be interculturally sound when it comes to race.  Hearing about these Plush neighborhoods, makes me jealous because I grew up in a home that is overwhelmed with poverty, and I believe all shall be equal, but we are not.  Using this 'private messaging application that hundreds of residents, majority white, use to deem the suspicious, (mostly blacks), should not be something, Rich White People should be using to solve their problems by racial profiling, having this sort of enthnocentral perspective towards an observation of black men, when in real life if a white man does the same observation of the black man, it would be treated Differently.  I feel that as I go on in this class, I believe that the future has So Much More   adversity   that I will have to face, by seeing what is happening to many black and colored people.  By having the money, you can use that to gain all the riches in the world but cannot earn respect and the respect of being interculturally a citizen in US.  By the way that the AA male dressed, was improper for a black male so he was considered extremely suspicious and had shown mischievous acts.

Kohler-Hausmann: Blogpost #2

Katharine Martin

Blogpost #2

Kohler-Hausmann

After President Lyndon B. Johnson declared the national “War on Poverty”, in the 1960s, our government became determined to reduce our country’s poverty rates with various enactments that expanded our welfare system in numerous ways. The welfare system of the United States has changed throughout the years, since Johnson was in office, with new forms of social welfare being practiced and regulated; however, the transition from “morally tested welfare” to “means tested welfare”, inadvertently, created the inescapable culture of poverty that our country still suffers from. The intense regulations and surveillance of welfare recipients has lead many to the belief that this system is focusing too hard on how much people may deserve welfare, instead of how many people actually need and deserve the welfare programs aid. I found this article on CNN and it is no surprise that this traditionally conservative news station has produced an article on the “study from the Cato Institute analyzing the impact of welfare programs on employment concludes that the current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work” (Thompson, 2013). Meaning that, the government believes the welfare programs available are more than enough to provide for people living below the poverty line, and this article serves represent that point of view, as the author claims, “If Congress and state legislatures are serious about reducing welfare dependence and rewarding work, they should consider strengthening welfare work requirements, removing exemptions, and narrowing the definition of work” (Thompson, 2013). Although the intervention of government aid has helped our country’s “issue” of poverty before, I do not agree with this article’s opinion that the welfare system has done more than enough to help those in need and I would hope that conservative people can take a step back from seeing poverty as an issue (particularly, one that's not theirs) and understand that the provisions related to the welfare system are actually what’s perpetuating the cycle of poverty, as people cannot advance financially in our society if they are ever a welfare recipient.

Source

Thompson, CK. 2013. “The State of the Welfare State.” CNN iReport: Washington DC, USA. ( http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1024482 )

Blog Post

John Walker

October 12, 2015

University of Colorado

               

                                                Blog Post

 

Discussion Question #2

 

There were moments in the video when it suggest living in Pruitt Igoe is like living in a prison.  The structure and the way it was constructed and the behavior and actions that went on their by the people.  The place was like living in hell.  There were not many jobs or opportunities for the people there which lead to violent acts. People who was there wanted better lives for themselves but the exterior things damaged the place. The resident talked about how they were eager to get into a new improvement but it failed. The project started off nice but when the government stopped funding them it fell apart. It was sewage everywhere, no heat, dirty, and etc just like jail. In jail you don’t have extras only the basic which is not enough to survive and live comfortable. Blacks were not allowed to own property, so the number of people renting decreased and the estimated money to be used for upkeep never arrived. Fathers wasn’t allowed to be at the house if women was on welfare.  So no support there. They controlled people on welfare and treated them like prisoners.  Whited wanted to be segregated and didn’t want to live with blacks. Public housing was used as a tool for segregation covertly. Fighting in the community was a way to get respect just like in jail. In jail once you first go in there you usually have to get into a fight to show people how tough you are and get respect to gain some type of power. The police stopped responding to emergency calls and let the blacks be on their own and the crime rate went through the roof. Just like in jail police let you fight and hurt each other until someone dies and then they come and add that to your punishment. Funding was the major problem here behind

An interview with author D. Watkins

Zin Telling

This Fresh Air interview takes place between author D. Watkins and Terry Gross. Watkins has just published a book telling stories of how he grew up on the streets of Baltimore. He gives an extremely personal and insightful look into a Baltimore ghetto. I think it relates very well to our reading of Loic Waquant and to the Pruitt Igoe documentary.

Watkins tells us of the ghetto which was created by white supremacy and racist housing tactics. The Baltimore described exemplifies the idea of a “Black Belt.” He states how hard it was to find a job in the ghetto and says, in fact, that it was easier to find a gun than to find a job. This speaks directly to the Waquant reading. Watkins gives a poignant look into the effects of the war on drugs. Lives were greatly affected and Watkins says that all people in his circle have at least one person who is close to them who was directly affected by the crack epidemic.

He shows how few opportunities for growth people in the ghetto have and describes it as a trap which is almost impossible to get out of. Like in Pruitt Igoe, the Baltimore ghetto described shows how deprived people were from the opportunities that it takes to have a good life. Both places were very reminiscent of a prison. In Pruitt Igoe we saw that the basic human needs such as waste disposal and education were ignored. A mom has to create a blackboard on a wall in her home to survive, for her children to thrive. Watkins talks about how segregated it really is when you live on the streets and the culture shock he felt when he left home for college. He was able to leave the ghetto but was one of the lucky few.  This is an example of what Waquant calls the “(denial of) access to cultural capital.” PG 119

I think that D. Watkins’ portrayal of the streets of Baltimore shows us the results of discriminatory housing policies and the propaganda that fueled the war on drugs. We’ve seen how the war on drugs led to the detriment of the ghetto, which helps to contribute to the perpetuation of the racial caste system operating in the U.S. today (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow.)

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/10/01/444978356/baltimore-author-discusses-living-and-dying-while-black

Pruitt-loge

Yuri wright

After viewing the film “The Myth Of Pruitt-loge,” I learned a lot of very interesting things about the inner city and how they were created to keep African Americans in secluded areas area from the white people. The people in of this St. Louis ghetto were set up in public housing. The public housing system was set up very similar to the prison system that we see today. The idea behind building public house was to help the people who were less fortunate with their living situation, which was mainly the African American community.  The public housing that was built was very similar to what we see jails look like “the first prisionization of public housing as well as retirement homes, single room occupancy hostels, homeless shelters which they turn to look like detention centers. Also projects, have been fenced up, there perimeter placed under beefed up security patrols and authoritarian controls, including identification card cheeks, signing in electronic monitoring, police infiltration, random searches, segregation, curfews, etc. all familiar procedures of   prison management.”

The essay When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mash, is related to Pruitt-loge, in both we can see that that people in the film were purposely being segregated from their whit peers because of their color of their skin. Africans Americans were being forced to living in housing systems, which at first they thought would be great, but they could only live in these housing systems if they could follow certain rules. If these rules were broken you where liable to lose the benefits and end up homeless. Father were not allow to live in these homes if they were not working or had no income, jobs where hard to hard find because all the jobs that were available where set up in areas were it wasn’t easy to travel to. This forced men to start doing things like selling drugs, which ultimately puts them at risk of ending up in jail. When they end up in jail and they come out they cant get jobs because of their record which them forces them back into doing the same thing. This sis a big part if the reason why we see a lot of single patent homes in the black communities. The big issue that we see in Pruitt-loge is the government refusing the fund and supports the people in this ghetto. This causes a lot of violence because the government doesn’t put, much funding into policing in these areas, which bring along a lot of violence. Violence is something that we saw was common in both Pruitt-loge and When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mash

Pruitt-Igo Projects

Shannon Sharpe

As I watched the movie Pruitt-Igo I seen a great amount of ideas and illustrations that showed how Pruitt-Igo could seem a bit like a prison outside of prison. The first thing that stood out to me was living conditions. When Pruit-Igo projects were first built they started off as a nice place to live. Over time the living conditions in this area worsened because the government stopped funding Pruitt-Igo. One individual in the movie spoke of a time that the tenants of Pruitt-Igo were living without a heater during a cold winter. This led to one of main sewage pipes bursting which caused the community to flood. The people of Pruitt-Igo tried to stop the flooding but it was impossible due to lack of resources. Once the government stopped funding the projects crime rates in the area rose drastically, so drastically that the police stopped coming to help the people because it was so dangerous. Another reason police stopped coming to help the people was that Pruitt-Igo was a predominantly black area, and at the time blacks were still trying to climb the ladder of equality. Government funding seemed to be another way that the projects might have felt a little like living in prison. Since the government was funding the projects they determined who lived in them and also who could and could not visit. Do to government regulations many kids in the community would rarely get to see the their fathers. One person in the documentary explained how he would have to lie to the people in charge regulating the projects about seeing his father or his father living with his family because his father had a job and men with jobs were not allowed to live there their families. Fighting was also very common in the Pruitt-Igo projects. Similar to prison fighting was a way to ear respect in the community amongst the community especially for African Americans. If you knew how to fight people would not bother you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWiyBuHUCfY

 This scene from the movie Friday is similar to how you earn respect from fighting in a low income community. Once Craige beat up the neighborhood bully Debo. His 

Detroit Lives

Detroit lives

http://www.vice.com/video/detroit-lives-full-length

Detroit Lives Johnny Knoxville

In this feature documentary by Johnny Knoxville we see how a broken down community can turn into a dream for hipsters. We see how gentrification has been an ongoing phenomenon throughout our countries histories. In this documentary johnny knoxville goes around places in detroit that used to be feared places but have now turned into areas where white youth are flocking too. Gentrification comes at the expense of minorities whose communities were ripped apart by private investors and building planners. As blacks and latinos were pushed out of neighborhoods they were forced into these city high rises that they could barely afford. Through decades of struggles these families were forced out of where they lived due to social construction. In the documentary we learn that even with young white suburban youths flocking to these types of living for that edgy lifestyles. The local communities love it. Through the youth moving to places such as detroit it give life back into a community that has not had it for years. With these youths businesses are formed co-operations are formed between local farmers. The community gets a facelift from the dark past that it has endured. I found this documentary interesting because it looks at the other sides of gentrification instead of the bad. With all of the good that these youths are doing you still can not overlook the fact that these communities were left to die when the factories left. People's lives were devastated all to the fact that these big corporations are doing what they please with no regard for human life. These factories are what these cities economy was based off of and for them to just close down the factories created a vacuum for crime to happen. With all of these people laid off it created the perfect opportunity for others to prey on the innocent.

Life in the Projects 10/12

http://narrative.ly/stories/life-in-public-housing/

This article narrates the personal accounts of people who have lived in the projects in New York and their take on what the “embarrassment and a stigma attached to it [and being] poor at that time” was and is still currently like to experience first-hand (Yvone). These stories represent another angle to the experiences of people coming from the projects as detailed in the film Pruitt-Igoe Myth we watched this week. Many of the people interviewed in this article realize there’s a negative stigma against coming from and/or living in the projects, but are not fully defined by it as outsider might fully define them by it. As Sharon says, “Just because I lived in the projects didn’t mean I had to become the projects.” One man named Yvone says living in the projects was similar to a prison: “It's just so confining to me that it feels like a compound. It feels like a prison. I guess this is how they regulate the poor” which supports reasoning that the ghetto and the prison cycle each other’s social environments and are very similar to one another in culture as Wacquant states in his article we read this week Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.  This article also relates to the documentary by giving a realistic yet more positive view on life in the projects. These people have clearly had multifaceted experiences and their backgrounds are not all composed of negative memories. As Jayro says, “I can see the bad that comes out of the projects, but I can also see the bad that comes out of the wealthier side. Who's to judge which one is better or worse?” This article upholds the notion that public housing may not be exactly the best way to solve the issue of poverty and that these communities continue to cycle people in and out of prison. As Yvone says, “At one point in time, public assistance really helped you move on. Today, public assistance is about keeping you right where you're at. It's indentured servitude, but you never get the chance to work out of it.” Overall, it gives a more personal perspective on those who have experienced life in the projects and supports the ideas that public housing can cycle people into prison and the current system hasn’t solved poverty or racial issues in urban environments.

Wacquant Reading Response

ETHN 3102

Prof. Holmes

Katharine Martin

10/9/15

Reading Response: Wacquant

Upon watching the film, “The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe,” and learning about the demise of a monumental public housing project, the more I realized how similar this “ghetto” of St. Louis was in operation to that of a prison. Although the thought behind Pruitt-Igoe’s development was positive in its goal to house the city’s poor and working classes, the failure to plan for the financial burdens and maintenance of these eleven story apartment buildings, led to the eventual death of Pruitt-Igoe. Urban historians featured in the film discussed the 1949 Housing Act as one that “was used to reshape the city to best suit those in power” (T. M. O. P-I., 2011), as the city attempted to desegregate the projects after Brown vs. Board of Education. However, these attempts resulted in whites leaving the city and the ideal of urban renewal became that of ‘black removal’ from white neighborhoods, as segregation continued to persevere.

Wacquant’s essay, “When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mash,” directly correlates with Pruitt-Igoe, as it discusses four critical elements of how the ghetto became more like a prison. Firstly, Wacquant discusses the ‘class segregation overlaying the racial segregation’, as low-income families are drawn to projects of public housing within close proximity to their occupations and unemployed welfare recipients are drawn to the opportunity to live nicely and raise their children with the help of federal aid; but what they failed to realize was the freedom they were also surrendering by agreeing to live under the constraints of public housing that coincidentally mirror those constraints of being incarcerated. Wacquant then talks about the ‘loss of positive economic function’ leading to the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty within the projects and Pruitt-Igoe serves as a perfect example of this, as the tenants were responsible for the upkeep of these buildings financially through their rent payments and the racism occurring left many African Americans without the funds to support maintenance of their buildings; thus, the quality of life and physical environment of Pruitt-Igoe began to fade. Violence and vandalism became common in Pruitt-Igoe, as the entirety of the nine building public housing units, gained its poor and dangerous reputations. The federal government’s failure to plan for multiple scenarios to occur as a result of building Pruitt-Igoe, left the government somewhat helpless in the matter; a notion relating to Wacquant’s third premise, ‘state institutions of social control replacing communal institutions.’ Many former residents of Pruitt-Igoe were interviewed in the documentary and one woman discussed how “the police, fire-fighters, and ambulances became the enemy and anything they could do to fight them off they would” (T. M. O. P-I., 2011). This woman’s recount reflects Wacquant’s point that “decrepit public housing that subjected its tenants and the surrounding population to extraordinary levels of criminal insecurity, infrastructural blight and official scorn” (107). Wacquant’s fourth point that the ‘loss of a buffering function and the depacification of everyday life’, perpetuates the ghetto and prison similarities, as the combination of the “wage-labor market and the welfare state (in the context of unflinching segregation)” (Wacquant, 2001: 107), has contributed to our society’s cycle of poverty. The welfare system was highly present in Pruitt-Igoe and it left many women and children without the resources to climb out of poverty; a cycle that convicts experience as well, in that removing one’s self from criminal activity isn’t as simple as it may seem to people who haven’t experienced living in places like Pruitt-Igoe.

References:

Wacquant, Loïc. 2001. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment and Society 95-121, Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications.

Freidrichs, Chad. 2011. The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe (Documentary). First Run Features.

America's Racial Disappearing 'Act'

America’s Racial Disappearing ‘Act’

“1.5 Million Missing Black Men”  by Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt, and Kevin Quealy (The New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?_r=0

“Deadly Symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh” by Loic Wacquant (Punishment & Society)

Presently, increased attention on police brutality and the state-facilitated murder of African American men has brought the United States’ abysmal race relations to the forefront of media and politics. But somehow, the “1.5 million black men missing from everyday life,” as reported by the New York Times this year, is not eliciting sufficient concern from state officials tasked with the safety of American lives. By examining “Deadly Symbiosis” by Loic Wacquant, we see where these African American men have gone. Wacquant traces U.S. history to show how four ‘peculiar institutions’ have been “defining, confining and controlling” African Americans in what is essentially a process of racial engineering by the state (Wacquant, 98).

Wacquant’s theory is that there have been four institutions in American History that have functioned as ‘race-making’ devices which “[draw] and enforce the peculiar ‘color line’” (Wacquant, 98). These institutions are as follows: slavery, the Jim Crow South, the ghetto and finally, the 'hyperghetto' or prison. Wacuant argues that each institution was used as a new way to extract labor and socially ostracize stigmatized African Americans. After slavery was abolished there was a shortage in cheap labor, so the ruling southern class created Jim Crow laws, establishing “forced labor and police laws to get the freedmen back to the fields and under control” (Wacquant, 100). The aggressiveness of these laws forced a migration of African Americans to urban areas in the North for industrial work. White fear of miscegenation led to the creation of the ghetto, which along with restrictive covenants, kept African Americans secluded and segregated from society. Wacquant states that “the prison functions as a ‘judicial ghetto’ relegating individuals disgraced by criminal conviction to a secluded space harboring the parallel social relations and cultural norms that make up ‘a society of captives’” (Wacquant, 103).

Now, how does the disappearance of African American men effect African American women? Remarkably, “black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis” (New York Times). This was so significant to the division of class because it lead to the reality that in 1980, “three out of every four [African American] households were headed by women” (Wacquant). Single-mother households are statistically less financially stable than households with two parental incomes. I argue that this contributed to the depacification of black communities and the subsequent masculinization of young black men when interacting with each other. Finally, the degeneration of ghettos into “hyperghettos” was marked by a distinct ‘prisonization’ of public and low income housing. African American bodies were already secluded, segregated and then layered with additional state controls such as “police infiltration, random searches, …curfews, and resident counts” (Wacquant, 107).  

It is time for the American public to start examining the institutions that are causing an overwhelming number of African American men to ‘disappear’ from society.  This gap, “driven mostly by incarceration and early deaths, does not exist among whites” (New York Times). This signifies a serious race problem, not just with American society, but more importantly with the judicial & legislative enforcement of the State itself. The disappearance of 1.5 million African American men in the U.S. is not an accident or a magic ‘act.’ Let us call this ‘disappearance’ for what it is: racial engineering by our beloved United States of White Supremacy.