Even though many people do not discriminate intentionally, it still occurs in many of our daily interactions. The wealth gap between white and black has nearly quadrupled over the last generation. Racial discrimination is implemented in our society not on purpose, but due to the past. White families coming from money have enough money to send their children to college and continue their wealth and success. Many black and latino families are stuck in the true trap of poverty, a poverty unlike the "mythical poverty" which many of us like to imagine. Daria Roithmayer wrote in her article "The Numbers Dont Lie" that we are stuck in a time of "lock-in". The lock-in model focuses on the way that competitive advantage can begin to automatically reproduce itself over time until the advantage eventually becomes insurmountable or, in a phrase, locked in. The lock-in model can help us to understand how it is that racial gaps may well persist indefinitely, even if all intentional discrimination were to end tomorrow"
People unintentionally refer friends or family of theirs who are the same race for jobs, thus taking opportunities away from those of other races. The cycle is continuous and we should work to eliminate the "white privilege" effect from whites being able to build themselves off of wealth from previous generations and diversify society.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daria-roithmayr/the-numbers-dont-lie_b_4633715.html
This is an excellent point/phenomenon that you've brought up. It's related to one of the comments that I made in class about one of the most important and pivotal things I learned in regards to race, intersectionality, prejudice, discrimination, etc.: your actions can be racist without your intent being racist. Things that seem inconsequential or isolated from our perspective often have a much greater sociocultural context and significance, and so this means that we can often enforce oppressive or discriminatory trends without any knowledge or intent to do so. In fact, as we've started to learn this week in our readings, simply existing as a white person in Western society means that I benefit from systems that have historically been structured based on white supremacy. This is something of which I have been entirely ignorant for most of my life, and it's been uncomfortable and at times outright painful to learn about in further depth. And still, often my knowledge of my privilege or the institutionalized biases that work drastically in my favor do nothing to immediately address or change the issues at the root of the problem. However, it is impossible to address the problem until we as a society acknowledge that it exists, as opposed to perpetuating false, incoherent, and/or discriminatory worldviews and stereotypes (portraying minority races as lazy or unintelligent and therefore "justifying" their gross lack of representation in high-level positions; spreading the falsehood that capitalism is an equal playing field and that everyone has the same degree of opportunity and access to the same resources; disparaging policies like affirmative action or ethnicity-based scholarship opportunities; denying the validity of others' experiences because we have not witnessed the same treatment firsthand; etc.). You've raised a tremendously important issue here, and you explain it very well.
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