Race Relations and the Modern Day

The visions of race relation that we studied from Chapter 6 in Wilson's book really made me think about how far our society has really come, but in another perspective, how far we really haven't actually moved. When you think about what the country was like back in the 60's, we had all sorts of movement going on in the world. We were finally transitioning from a truly racist culture, to a really accepting group of people? In some ways, yes. In others, absolutely not. When looking at our society, its easy to argue that we really haven't changed that much at all.

The video that was shown in my group's presentation (Gerardo and I), showed that people haven't changed a whole lot at all in their assumptions about other races. The way someone mentioned in the video how their vocabulary was impressing a high class white man, she was a middle class black woman, was honestly kind of offensive. The way that a high class white guy can look at someone and actually say, oh you're pretty smart, when he would have never said that to a white woman. Or, when looking at recent events, the way that the media covers the deaths in the inner city and the deaths of innocent black men by the hands of white officers. Some stations speculate how the black man was offending the law instead of just looking at him as innocent and that maybe, just MAYBE, the white officer was the one that was at fault.

This chapter has made me really think about the paper I wrote last semester about the relationship between the black community and the police. The police are looked at as a gang in the inner city, and are claimed as the worst one out there. To me, that's awful. The way that some police are allowed to do that kind of job with a prejudice is beyond me. Black militant organizations took things in to their own hands, instead of trying to get along. It was the elimination of wanting to coexist and became far more about pride in your race. Eventually, these feelings clearly have changed in to new forms. There's still these feelings, clearly among both groups, but at the very least, race relations have slowly come to a better spot than it was in, with a more accepting tone, but there's still plenty of tension, and in history, as Wilson stated, this has been a pattern that has followed multicultral societies forever.