Week 1

In the first article, I read “Racial formation” I got an interesting look at the past which happened to correlate very well with the Andrea Smith Article of “Heteropatriarchy and the 3 Pillars of White Supremacy”. Primarily the first article presented an argument about race being a socio-historic and socially constructed matter which I found very interesting. It argued that the history of race and racism in the US was very dependent on the history, citing other nations which had different racial views dependent on how their unique racial structures formed. The racialization of African Americans in the US can be credited for the uneven and clear racial line between African Americans and white people. The racialization started with slavery and seems to continue to this day with negative portrayals of African Americans in media and often institutionalized racism. In addition, the article brought up the differences in racial categories between different groups of people. In the United States a person who is 1/32 black may be forced to identify as black, in order to put them into a different racial category for public services. A person who has never been categorized as black in Latin America may be categorized as black once they come to the US. These differences show more of the racially constructed factor behind race and racism. Regardless of the “amateur biology” being used to try to argue different races of humans the simple matter is that many people believe these lies. In the second article, Andrea Smith went about explaining how these 3 pillars of white supremacy have shaped the US, much to do with racialization of African Americans, native Americans and foreign-born Americans. She addresses slavery/capitalism, genocide/colonialism and orientalism/war. Through her article its not hard to see how to the US is propped up by racially uneven public policy and the past and continued exploitation of the native people. In addition, she goes on to talk about how she believes different groups should come together to fight these institutions, by uniting as different groups of people of color a very positive difference can be made. Overall, these articles more so talk about just how deep the lines of racial inequality go in the US, certainly deeper than I thought and I would find it interesting to see the reaction of the average white American to some of these realities.