I really enjoyed class last Monday. I thought the discussion brought up some aspects of race and race relations that do not get talked about enough, and La Don's and Carol's stories were compelling. To me, it seemed like La Don was still processing some of her experiences after all these years. It was laudable to me  that she still kept in contact with her family back in Mart, and that she wanted to be some type of role model for her niece and nephew even though she conceded that she did not know how much they genuinely accepted her as anything more than just family.

I thought the most contentious point and the most interesting part of the discussion was the idea that desegregation or even changing laws because of perceived discrimination was not always the best thing for a community or society. A few examples of that immediately popped into my head. The first one was the busing catastrophe in Boston that took place in the 1970's. In Michael MacDonald's memoir, All Souls, he explains that his white, South Boston, Irish-Catholic community was so tight-knit that integrating the schools was unfathomable to them. It is interesting to note that he claimed that integrating with the African-American kids at his school made his community reexamine their own poverty because of how insular their projects were to the rest of Boston. Their poverty and crime was just as bad (or probably worse at that time) as the poverty and crime in Roxbury, but as he explained, they were not "black," so, as was implicitly accepted, they just believed their South Boston neighborhood was better. Their violent response was not so much a referendum against African-Americans as much as a projection of their own flaws as a community and not wanting outside forces dictating how their community would function. Ultimately, their communities were more similar than different in terms of the institutional oppression and the corruption they faced, but they would not accept that.

The second example that popped into my head was Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing, which depicts race relations between an Italian-American family who runs a pizza joint in the predominantly black and hispanic neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. In the movie, the pizzeria was an institution within the neighborhood, but it literally and metaphorically collapses because of cultural differences, preconceived stereotypes, and most importantly, a lack of communication between the different groups of people. 

The third example that popped into my head was the history of the federal guidelines in sentencing within the United States' criminal justice system. In the 80s, many liberals thought the discretion of judges for sentencing was discriminatory (in some places it definitely was). This lead to the idea that politicians should create sentencing mandates that determine sentences with little discretion from judges. Since the institution of these guidelines and compounded with the "crime control" method of policing, the United States has seen increased admissions, longer sentences, and less parole for inmates. It has backfired, with many people claiming it is a classist system that lessens due process, and a system where rehabilitation is looked at as a low priority. Who takes the brunt of this "anti-discriminatory policies?" Minorities.

We want to live in a "post-racial" world, but each community is too complex to live in a world like that. I think lack of communication or dialogue or even experience of interactions plays a large role in the misconceptions we put on other people and groups. How do we remedy this? Is a multi-cultural world the right world when we still don't have the genuine want to understand others? Or do we embrace isolated ethnic communities (its positives and negatives)? Does class ultimately play a larger role than race or ethnicity in a multicultural world?