Reference no: EM133319505

Question 1: Blumer argues that we often think about racism as a matter of individual attitudes. But in reality, he says that racism is much more social. Please explain why Blumer makes that argument. Do you find his approach to the construction of racial threat convincing? Why or why not? Would you add anything to or take anything out of his model?

Question 2: What is the relationship between individual/group empathy and public policy? In other words, how does a group's (or country's) sense of collective identity shape whom it deems worthy of empathy, and how does that sense of worthiness (or lack of it) come out in public policy? Consider the podcast interviewee's (Heba Gowayed) analysis of the US, Canadian, and German refuge systems.

Question 3: Bauman argues that for systematized, modern rational violence, you need three factors: 1) visionary/utopian leadership that defines some people as weeds; 2) a bureaucratic system that shields individuals from moral responsibility; and 3) a docile, civilized public. Please explain what Bauman means by each of these three factors and provide examples of each from sources

Question 4: Arendt argues that modern bureaucratic violence represents evil that is "banal"-shallow and thoughtless, perpetrated by mediocre bureaucrats who refuse to think deeply about the consequences of their actions, instead internalizing legal/ideological directives as
moral ones (e.g., Eichmann, who saw his labor for the Final Solution as a moral imperative). Yet as Paul Grüninger's story shows, normal, everyday people can resist banal evil through a deep commitment to ideals/beliefs that are more important to them than the law/official ideology.

What interests drive the "banal evil" of mass incarceration-profit? Status for white people in the US's racial hierarchy? Fear of those stereotyped as dangerous? Something else? Second, what are sacred values, and what values drive those who resist/oppose mass incarceration (e.g., commitment to human rights and democracy? A desire for justice? Something else?)? Finally, what are symbolic
gestures, and what symbolic or material gestures (e.g., automatically pardoning of all nonviolent offenders? Acknowledgement of the
system's targeting of people of color, especially black folks? Redirection of funding to community support programs instead of prisons and law enforcement? Prison abolition? New tech-like ankle monitors-that transform homes into prisons? Others?) might begin reforming the US mass incarceration system?

Question 5: Social identity theorists argue that we gain our senses of personal self-esteem from membership in groups whose statuses matters to us. Because individual identity depends on group status, we're motivated to ensure that our groups win when in competition with other groups. In seeking to win, we stereotype/essentialize members of our group in positive ways and members of out-groups in negative ways.

1) How can social identity theory help us understand the enduring, structural nature of racism in the US?;

2) What is motivated reasoning, and what examples can be seen from people engaging in motivated reasoning to protect their group's interests?

3) What examples of positive in-group and negative out-group stereotyping are there?

Question 6: Blumer points toward four things that must be present in a dominant group for group prejudice to become a problem: a feeling of superiority, a sense of intrinsic difference, privileges, and the sense that those privileges are under threat. Marginalized groups only seem
threatening when dominant group spokespeople-usually elites- depict them that way, usually through mass media. How did elites use law-and-order rhetoric and dog whistles (words andphrases that are coded to carry racist meanings while providing plausible deniability because they're not explicitly racist) to construct threat for white audiences?

- How can Blumer help us understand why these appeals were so successful?

Consider, for example, media depictions of blackness; Nixon's Southern Strategy; George Bush's Willie Horton add; etc. Are threatening appeals still successful today?

Are there contemporary examples (e.g., how might Blumer help us understand the reaction of many white people to the Black
Lives Matter movement or opposition to immigration)?

Question 7: Explain the concept of structural violence and provide examples and demonstrate how racism was/is structured into American
society;

explain why this form of structural violence (structural racism) seems so mundane/normal to many Americans-to the point that some wrongly think that structural racism doesn't exist.
Please draw on social identity theory, motivated reasoning, and tribal thinking to the second part of the question.