Covert racism and colorblind policy in contemporary America

Social Construction of Race and Gender

The purpose of this article is to explore the methods by which Social Construction of Race and Gender are reproduced in the 21st century. In the past, commonplace social practices of discrimination such as segregation in schools, restrictive covenants and redlining in housing, "whites only" drinking fountains, blacks on the back of the bus, and the KKK left no question about the role of racism in controlling and regulating of society. However, in a post-civil rights society racism is often covert and people can choose to be oblivious as to how it is manifested (Rachlinski, 2009). This study is premised on the existence and the consistence perpetuation of racism in the U.S. And the subsequent profiling of roles based on race and gender. The historical development of this phenomenon of addressed whilst mentioning some of the laws that have been developed to curb this vice, which threatens the harmony existing in the society.

Contemporary U.S. Gender and Racism

Racial politics encompasses the role of social construction of race and race differences in formal, institutional politics and the political interpretations of everyday life. In the U.S., racial politics were established and secured through a formalized, legally constituted racial caste system with a nearly rigid color line. However, racial politics, which protected centuries-old policies of white entitlements, were threatened by the passing of civil rights laws and affirmative action programs. The elimination of rigid laws of exclusion, which seems to have eradicated the most overt signs and symbols of racism, implies that we are living in a racial democracy. However, the fact is that systems that preserve and re-inscribe racial hierarchies are as intact today as they were during the height of U.S. racial apartheid (Gurin, 2008).

In the case of Affirmative Action, debates about its legitimacy are fought based on its potential to destabilize the status quo because with its passing emerged the possibility that racial entitlements for whites would be lost. Consequently, colorblind laws such as California's Proposition 209 and The Right to Racial Privacy Initiative targeted such laws intended to provide redress of historic social inequalities. Prop 209 in its entirety outlawed California's Affirmative Action programs by asserting that the State would not discriminate based on race and gender (Wedding, 2010). Titled "The Civil Rights Initiative," the law was promoted as pro-civil rights, antidiscrimination law. The use of the word discriminate was strategic. The government should not discriminate although the new use of the word does not hold the same meaning as the old anti-discrimination language. Now it meant that the State would not recognize historically oppressed groups in order to adjust for structural discrimination.

Similarly, by eliminating Affirmative Action the State would be stripped of any potential redistributive power. Without affirmative action, the State law masks as natural what is chosen whilst eliminating the effects of social profiling. When the structural forces of a racist, capitalist and patriarchal society, which select and rank white men above all other groups when left undisturbed by social manipulations of affirmative action, will be enough to deliver the same racial arrangements as those of more historically overt and rigid racial regimes (Irons, 2010).

If "The Right to Racial Privacy Initiative" is passed, it will be a tremendous boon to the color-blind culture. Elimination of racial classifications results in the inability to measure racial inequality in employment and other critical areas of social life. Eliminating racial classifications and suppressing the public discourse on race will not produce neutral grounds for harmony to thrive. The systems that perpetuated oppression in the pre-civil rights era were not eliminated but just transformed. Without any regulatory oversight and standards for affirmative action, we resort to U.S. racial politics of the past. The new ethos of color-blindness, which emerged as the so-called solution to ending race-based politics, is instead a strategy to preserve and protect racial hierarchies. In the Supreme Courts' review of the validity of affirmative action programs, it was established that race must only be used to refer to skin color devoid of any historical, political, or determination or history. This color-blind ruling disavowed any knowledge of the historic meanings of race and established a precedent that "nobody's skin color should be taken into account in government decision-making" (Gurin, 2008).

Media

Racial ideologies have long been a media staple. At the end of the year, one television station was looking back on their news reporting and bragging that viewers got breaking stories more often from them than any other news outlet. As they showed a collage of news stories reported throughout the year, they used an image of a black male in an orange jail jumpsuit to introduce the segment on crime reports. This image was self-explanatory since black men symbolized criminal activity and arresting them made the communities safe. The ideological connections between black men and criminal behavior are a part of our collective awareness. Despite the fact that whites commit more crimes, white men are not pathologized as a threat to society. Black faces are usually attached to what we think of as a crime (Wedding, 2010).

Law Enforcement and Racial Profiling

Racial profiling treats blacks and other minority groups as criminal suspects based on the assumption that doing so will increase the odds of catching criminals. This strategy, adopted by law enforcement, used throughout the retail industry and in the war on terrorism, has helped to forge the relationship of blacks and other non- whites and criminal behavior. Contrary to what the rational law enforcement justification for racial profiling would predict, the hit rate for drugs and weapons in police searches of African-Americans is the same as or lower than the rate for whites (Rachlinski, 2009).

Racial profiling of all white males as criminals would be unthinkable. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing when the attack was first assumed the work of terrorists ideological constructions that targeted men of Middle Eastern descent were employed. When it became clear that white men were responsible, race became irrelevant. Timothy McVeigh and his accomplices were not treated as white terrorists but as individual men who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Crimes for which white men are the suspects become focused and specific as expected of them so that no white men are treated as potential terrorists. Thus, white men have escaped the racial profiling that many argue is an essential law enforcement tactic (Irons, 2010).

How Social Institutions Contribute towards Racism

Social institutions like education, social welfare, and the criminal justice system reproduce social arrangements based on race and gender. Individuals who staff and run these institutions bring to them some consciousness informed by ideological belief systems that rationalize racial disparities. Pervasive ideological constructions of race create preconditions for how individuals are perceived and treated. The extent to which institutional arrangements mirror those of the broader society can be seen as normal and inevitable outcomes.

Uniformity in managing these tensions of race is found among all major social institutions. The ability of the criminal justice system to absorb the individuals, who fall through the bottom in education or social welfare, is predictable and predetermined. For example, by investing more money in corrections than education our expectations for the attainment of future generations has been sealed. For the cost of imprisoning one person for one year, California could educate ten community college students, five California State University students, or two University of California students. The role of institutions to formalize, document and label individual statuses to function as tracking systems that influence and even determine status arrangements. Its role also extends to include concealing any arbitrariness within the culture (Gurin, 2008).

The Problem of Racism

Most people believe that racism is an individual problem and that if individuals become nice to one another, this problem will be solved. However, racism supersedes an individual problem because it is structural. Racism depends on individuals to transfer racial values and endorse their laws and practices that legitimate racial hierarchies. However, the center of these actions is established in the hegemony; social structures made of practices, policies and laws normalizing race hierarchies and enabling them to be viewed as just and common sense. This is despite knowing that these systems are likely to reproduce racial inequalities. Individuals must be taught to view such inconsistencies as the result of individual failures that come from groups who cannot get it correctly. After watching the Color of Fear Video, white owners of vineyards describe their view of how the whites cling on their ethnic identities rather than just being Americans (Irons, 2010).

Conclusion

Instead of perceiving racism as an unfortunate symptom of current institutional arrangements, it should be interpreted as a set of tools, which produces and sustains social hierarchies. This study has identified some of these tools in the hope that they are rendered more discernible and criticized and resisted but possible to notice ideologies (Wedding, 20100. Contemporary societies have rendered invisible structural and ideological dynamics used to determine racial outcomes. Lack of old discrimination frameworks, like segregated houses, racial epithets and cross burning.

The elimination of rigid laws of exclusion, which seems to have eradicated the most overt signs and symbols of racism, implies that we are living in a racial democracy. This shows that instances of racism have been diminished. This has paved way for continued debates about the legitimacy of racism despite refutably evident persistence in the racial disproportional patterns seen in all aspects of social life. The new structures of racism make it easy for most of us to ignore it. This is the reason behind the success of modern race projects. The current society is increasingly becoming sophisticated in terms of defines, constructs, making new racism, racism practices and its disguise of laws, policies and practices regulating the color line as previous race regimes (Rachlinski, 2009).