Question 1
The Doonesbury cartoon presented in the question contains the quintessential arguments both for and against social justice. The NAACP representative in the cartoon—really a representative of all minority groups that fight for social justice—is acting by calling in doomsday propositions based on the current events in society. This is a parody that many people in the majority have about minority cultures—that because really terrible forms of discrimination were in the past and are no longer practiced, modern society does not need to recognize that there are still forms of discrimination practiced every day.
There is generally a sense of “what the urban community is like” in majority culture. The hegemonic culture is one that makes assumptions about the nature of the minority experience—in this case, the experience of African American individuals—and make judgments based on those assumptions. The NAACP has taken what they would perhaps perceive as the best strategy by framing the problem in an apocryphal way. What makes the comic less believable is the fact that the NAACP calls back and tries the frame the same issue again in a different way. This is what really demonstrates that the author does not have a good understanding of the nature of equality and justice in society, and that he is repeating information as fact without a good understanding of the problems that have been described. Both parties have a disagreement about social justice because the author of the comic strip built a straw man into the comic strip via the NAACP representative—the NAACP representative does not seem to know how to address the important issues.
Initially, the NAACP representative wants to focus on how bad everything is in the United States for African American people. The other man comes back and immediately states that things are better than they have ever been before—but this does not necessarily mean that things are good in society. Although some might describe this comic as a glass half full or empty scenario, it is actually much darker than that; the negation of the experiences of many disadvantaged people is often written off in society as being “not as bad as before.” Many intractable obstacles still remain to putting the finishing touches on full social justice, particularly in the city. Many neighborhoods are still much poorer than others, and children from poor neighborhoods still go to poor schools, meaning that the cycle of poverty continues in many places.
Poverty is the biggest problem for social justice in cities currently. As a society, Americans cannot put the finishing touches on social justice until the serious inequality associated with poverty is eliminated completely; it seems unlikely that poverty will ever be eliminated completely, so it also seems likely that inequality will remain. The cycle of poverty and violence is almost impossible to break free of, and thus, it is perpetuated further with every generation that is born into the cycle of poverty and violence. More needs to be done to provide better education and better opportunities to those who are caught in this cycle of violence, in the hopes of providing them the opportunity to break free from these continuous problems.
Question 2
There are many similarities between these two texts. They both deal with the issues that are associated with being a racial minority in a poor neighborhood; both deal with the power struggles and the structures within these neighborhoods. Both authors have a deep sympathy and understanding for the people who are living in these situations, and both authors are women—surprisingly, this gives the reader a very different perspective than if the author had been male. It seems as though both women have been flies on the wall for many convesations that they may have otherwise not been privy to because they were women and seemed relatively nonthreatening.
There were differences between these books as well, however. Mayorga-Gallo (2014) is a mixed-race woman who is discussing the realities of living in a mixed-race neighborhood, while Goffman (2014) is a white woman that experiences the realities of living in a predominately African American community. Although these things may not seem distinct at first because both women are writing from an ethnographic standpoint, there is a very real difference in the way each woman understands her experiences because of their respective backgrounds and historical understandings of their particular neighborhoods. They also chose vastly different neighborhoods: Philadelphia is a large city, while Durham, North Carolina is a much smaller city. As a result, the experiences of living in each of these cities respectively are very different.
The population of Philadelphia is much denser than that of Durham, North Carolina. Of the population, about 42% of both Durham and Philadelphia was white; however, Durham is a city of less than 250,000 people, while Philadelphia has a population of 1.5 million, as counted for the city and the county of Philadelphia. The percentage of individuals in Philadelphia neighborhoods that are one race is very high, meaning that many areas of Philadelphia are segregated by race. However, in Durham, there are many parts of the city that are mixed-race, but not mixed race with white individuals. Philadelphia has an overall deep crime rate that is very high, even for cities in the United States—it is an incredibly poor city, especially in parts like Camden.
Property values are much higher in Philadelphia—as would be expected, because of the nature of the larger city. However, the average monthly salary is much lower in Philadelphia than it is in Durham, which means that there are high housing prices combined with low wages—a dangerous combination. In addition, the loan terms are much poorer in Durham. These variables are very telling regarding the current state in both these cities: Durham is an easier place to make a living, and Philadelphia is undergoing major demographic changes as the housing prices rise in the region. This is commonly known as gentrification, and it almost always results in the older individuals in neighborhoods being pushed out of their homes because of the rising cost of housing. This has occurred in many cities around the United States, including San Francisco. Because there are more people in Philadelphia and the situation seems much more dire, it is easy to suppose that Philadelphia might need more help; however, both cities are seriously in need of assistance.
Question 3
The Urban Community, for some, represents the confluence of excitement, entertainment, refinement, or enlightenment and for others it is a breading ground for social pathology, misery, exploitation, and structural entrapment. These conflicting images of the city have created precarious processes of social differentiation, which have produced over time an urban social structure that represents a persistent pattern of social, economic, political, and spatial relationships. Symbolic power, cultural resources, political processes, and social and economic institutions hold individuals and groups in competitive and self-perpetuating hierarchies of domination. The text by Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates that there are still significant problems—at least until the writing and creation of the article—that dictate the ways that people from the urban centers are capable of interacting with the outside world.
As society reproduces itself, there are certain prejudices that are passed on from person to person over time, and there are certain institutional forms of segregation that are also passed on. The refusal of the mall to change its policy and allow a bus stop for individuals from the “bad side” of town was a refusal to allow people who didn’t fit into the accepted cultural paradigm—and this refusal cost a woman her life. Perhaps the most interesting part about the whole saga at the mall is the way that this particular experience was played out until someone was killed—in most spaces, merely making enough noise would have been enough to force a change.
There is no doubt that the individuals who were considered too “urban” for this upscale mall were the victims of discrimination. The social hierarchy is subtly but clearly underscored by the mall staff—if people are from the wrong place, then they are not welcome in the mall, and if they are present in the mall, it should only be as employees. The employees are, according to mall staff, significantly less important than the customers at the mall—even their lives are worth less than the other customers at the mall.
Of course, the mall management and staff probably were not analyzing this issue in such a dramatically racist way. Instead, this is an excellent example of de facto racism and how de facto racism—racism that is supported by societal structures rather than by law, as de jure racism would be—is passed along in cultural groups and normalized. By the time this mall was build, the racism that held that “those urban people” should not be allowed easy access to the mall was so ingrained that very few were even considering it as problematic until a woman lost her life. However, it was difficult for everyone in the mall management to break out of the historical paradigm that demanded a certain type of behavior towards the people from the nearby urban center.
Question 4
There are many different theories that attempt to determine why there are such massive amounts of inequality and racism in the urban centers in the United States today. However, it is completely impossible to divorce the discussion about urban centers in the United States from the discussion of poverty in the United State. Any understanding of the urban center without a coherent understanding of the levels of poverty that drive behavior in American urban centers is an incomplete understanding of American cities.
American cities are prone to racial and economic segregation. It seems logical that cities should be prone to economic segregation—this is the case around the world, and it is the reality of being part of a system that is predicated on money. However, in the United States, minority culture and poverty are closely associated, especially in the inner cities of the United States. There is no doubt that economic segregation is linked inextricably to racial segregation. There are still forces in the American society that prefer certain racial groups over others in all ways, including the ability to get a job or an education; the ease of access that majority culture-member individuals have to these kinds of resources makes in much easier for them to excel in the modern American economy. Minority groups, and members of those minority groups, then, have a much more difficult time accessing different resources, and therefore American society must work towards spatial justice—democratizing spaces and ensuring that everyone has the ability to access the same resources in society. Without access to the same resources in society, it becomes much more likely that an individual or a group of individuals will become economically disadvantaged due to societal prejudices—this is something that can be seen in the Gladwell article. In the Gladwell article, there is nothing ostentatiously illegal or discriminatory about not having a bus stop built specifically for a single group; however, when compared to the other groups that were allowed to come to the mall, there was a distinct difference in the way the disadvantaged group was treated—thus, there was a lack of spatial justice.
References
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