Fostering Racism

For our final project for Contemporary Racism, we were placed into groups, asked to pick an interesting topic concerning race, do individual research, and record a podcast with our group. My group chose to look at racial disparities in the American foster care system, a subject about which I had no prior knowledge. At first, I was uneasy about choosing a topic that I knew nothing about, feeling as if my unfamiliarity would provide me with some sort of handicap.  …

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Why Can’t All Bodies be Different, but Fought For the Same?

In her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander (2010) spells out the issues of the master narrative, which has, since the abolition of slavery and strategic implementation of the war on drugs and mass incarceration, legitimized and hidden from the American people what locking up thousands and thousands of Black bodies has done. The emergence of crack cocaine in impoverished streets and mandatory minimum sentencing laws covered up the racist intentions of politicians …

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Are We Beginning to Chip Away at Mass Incarceration? An Example from New York State

Last week, our class discussed mass incarceration, the system by which a vastly disproportionate amount of people of color are imprisoned for the use or distribution of illegal drugs. The situation is quite bleak; the system has been escalating for the past few decades and has wreaked havoc among communities of lower class people of color. Nevertheless, there may in fact be a ray of light at the end of the tunnel. Throughout the country, some states are decriminalizing, and …

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