SOC 1500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: White Supremacy, White Privilege
Document Summary
Pros: powerful analytical too for understanding what ethnicities are, and that racial boundaries are difficult to distinguish from ethnic ones. Cons: colorblind racism is subsuming race under ethnicity without empirical exploration: history shows quite distinct racial processes. Racial structure, forged in conquest, therefore constitutes structural racism (white supremacy) Over time, whites struggle to advance and maintain racial privileges and people of color struggle to challenge white privilege. Pros: illuminates tendencies that are found time and again: races is centrally about the creation and advancement if systematic privileges for whites, explains why racial ideologist vary so much historically, in defense of white privilege. Cons: overly aggregate, weak theory of history, cannot account for differences and contradictions between racial institutions: limited tools on how to advance anti-racism. Social actors advance social projects in complex and contradictory ways. Pros: account for a lot of nuance and historical process of construction of race: more than just the black/white binary.
