Race and Ethnicity Reflection Paper Please watch all three documentaries. Write

Race and Ethnicity Reflection Paper
Please watch all three documentaries.
Write 1 personal reflection paper on all three documentaries.
A typical reflection paper is between 500 and 1, 000 words long (no longer than 1, 200 words).
The paper must be in MLA format.
What did you learn from these documentaries?
Did you gain a new insight?
Describe a moment or scene in the documentary/ies that you found particularly disturbing or moving.
What was it about that scene that was especially compelling for you?
Did anything in the documentary/ies surprise you? Was anything familiar?
If you could ask anyone in the documentary/ies a single question, whom would you ask and what would you want to know?
What did you learn from this documentary/ies that you wish everyone knew? What would change if everyone knew it?
If you could require one person (or one group) to view these documentaries, who would it be? What do you hope their main takeaway would be?
What did you learn that you didn’t know before?
Did anything challenge what you know or thought you knew?
If you could pick one sociological theory to help you analyze and understand what you have watched, which would it be and why.
How has what you have learnt in Sociology 200 helped your understanding of race and ethnicity?
You can watch the two documentaries via the links below: (Netflix not needed)
KKK – The Fight For White Supremacy
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5yjy0i (Links to an external site.)
Thirteenth Amendment Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WU608Z2678 (Links to an external site.)
A Quick overview of the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Introduction
The sociology of race and ethnicity began to take shape in the late 19th century.
The American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, who was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard, is credited with pioneering the subfield within the United States with his famous and still widely taught books The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction.
However, the subfield today differs greatly from its early stages. When early American sociologists focused on race and ethnicity, du Bois excepted, they tended to focus on the concepts of integration, acculturation, and assimilation, in keeping with the view of the U.S. as a “melting pot” into which difference should be absorbed.
Concerns during the early 20th century were for teaching those who differed visually, culturally, or linguistically from the white Ango-Saxon norms how to think, speak, and act in accordance with them.
This approach to studying race and ethnicity framed those who were not white Anglo-Saxon as problems that needed to be solved and was directed primarily by sociologists who were white men from middle to upper-class families.
As more people of color and women became social scientists throughout the twentieth century, they created and developed theoretical perspectives that differed from the normative approach in sociology, and crafted research from different standpoints that shifted the analytic focus from particular populations to social relations and the social system.
Today, sociologists within the subfield of race and ethnicity focus on areas including racial and ethnic identities, social relations and interactions within and across racial and ethnic lines, racial and ethnic stratification and segregation, culture and worldview and how these relate to race, and power and inequality relative to majority and minority statuses in society.
How Sociologists Define Race and Ethnicity
Race refers to how we categorize people by skin color and phenotype–certain physical facial features that are shared to a certain degree by a given group. Common racial categories that most people would recognize in the U.S. include Black, white, Asian, Latino, and American Indian. But the tricky bit is that there is absolutely no biological determinant of race.
Instead, sociologists recognize that our idea of race and racial categories are social constructs that are unstable and shifting, and that can be seen to have changed over time in relation to historical and political events.
We also recognize race as defined in large part by context. “Black” means something different in the U.S. versus Brazil versus India, for example, and this difference in meaning manifests in real differences in social experience.
Ethnicity is likely a bit more difficult to explain for most people. Unlike race, which is primarily seen and understood on the basis of skin color and phenotype, ethnicity does not necessarily provide visual cues.
Instead, it is based on a shared common culture, including elements like language, religion, art, music, and literature, and norms, customs, practices, and history. An ethnic group does not exist simply because of the common national or cultural origins of the group, however. They develop because of their unique historical and social experiences, which become the basis for the group’s ethnic identity.
For example, prior to immigration to the U.S., Italians did not think of themselves as a distinct group with common interests and experiences. However, the process of immigration and the experiences they faced as a group in their new homeland, including discrimination, created a new ethnic identity.
Within a racial group, there can be several ethnic groups. For example, a white American might identify as part of a variety of ethnic groups including German American, Polish American, and Irish American, among others. Other examples of ethnic groups within the U.S. include and are not limited to Creole, Caribbean Americans, Mexican Americans, and Arab Americans.
Key Concepts and Theories of Race and Ethnicity
Early American sociologist W.E.B. du Bois offered one of the most important and lasting theoretical contributions to the sociology of race and ethnicity when he presented the concept of “double-consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk. This concept refers to the way in which people of color in predominantly white societies and spaces and ethnic minorities have the experience of seeing themselves through their own eyes, but also of seeing themselves as “other” through the eyes of the white majority. This results in a conflicting and often distressing experience of the process of identity formation.
Racial formation theory, developed by sociologists Howard Winant and Michael Omi, frames race as an unstable, ever-evolving social construct that is tied to historical and political events.
They assert that differing “racial projects” that seek to define race and racial categories are engaged in constant competition to give the dominant meaning to race. Their theory illuminates how race has been and continues to be a politically contested social construct, upon which is granted access to rights, resources, and power.
The theory of systemic racism, developed by sociologist Joe Feagin, is an importantly and widely used theory of race and racism that has gained particular traction since the rise of the BlackLivesMatter movement. Feagin’s theory, rooted in historical documentation, asserts that racism was built into the very foundation of U.S. society and that it now exists within every aspect of society.
Connecting economic wealth and impoverishment, politics and disenfranchisement, racism within institutions like schools and media, to racist assumptions and ideas, Feagin’s theory is a road map for understanding the origins of racism in the U.S., how it operates today, and what anti-racist activists can do to combat it.
Initially articulated by legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the concept of intersectionality would become a cornerstone of the theory of sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, and an important theoretical concept of all sociological approaches to race and ethnicity within the academy today.
The concept refers to the necessity of considering the different social categories and forces that race interacts with as people experience the world, including but not limited to gender, economic class, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, and ability