Discussion response framework and practices

Race

The student's observations about race in discussion 1 prompted me to think about the way our society uses affirmative action to deal with racial inequalities in the workplace. The student states early in the discussion that he had never been personally affected by race or racism -- and yet, after some reflection, he realizes that he had been. He tells the story of going for an interview at Target and being asked if he was Mexican because his name was Hernandez. He informed the interviewer that he was not Mexican and the interviewer immediately lost interest in him as a person. It seems the interviewer was only interested in hiring a particular race -- a Latino -- most likely to fill some sort of affirmative action quota.

This recollection by the student made me irritated because I began to consider how hypocritical our own society is about race. On the one hand we try to act like race shouldn't make a difference, that we shouldn't notice, that it shouldn't factor into our decisions and how we treat individuals -- and yet on the other hand, it obviously does make a difference, we do notice it (as even the student mentions at the end of the discussion, when he describes the different reactions he would have to seeing different races and genders and ages driving an expensive car), and we base a lot of our reactions on how we perceive race. Why should Target be more interested in hiring a Mexican because he is a Mexican? If a person speaks Spanish, this is a qualification. If a person's race is Latino, how is this a qualification? Our attitudes towards race are at best contradictory. I believe we should stop pretending like we don't notice race. Race is a big deal here (even if it isn't in other countries). And I don't see political strategies like affirmative action doing anything to solve the way we look at race. I see it as just one more form of racism.

However, the student's observations in discussion 5 challenged me to rethink the way we view race. The student notes that race is just a word we use to categorize groups of people based on how they look. Stereotypes are fostered by such attitudes, the student says. The ethnicity box in the voting booth, for example, is a major indicator of how views of races are made.

So, race can be defined as a word -- yes, but it doesn't have to define you as a person. I agree with that completely. But I don't see the problem of race going away anytime soon, at least not in this country. This country was founded by WASPS -- white Anglo-Saxon protestants -- and their ideologies still exist in the powerful institutions we call think-tanks. I don't believe that just because someone is black or white or brown or anything in between that person has to act according to a certain stereotype. The problem is that persons tend to live with persons similar to them. Thus, whole communities may be made up of a particular ethnicity. Sometimes races just seem to segregate themselves -- probably partly because of how our culture is and partly because they want to be around people who have shared their sense of history, identity, struggles, and outlooks on life.