This paper covers white privilege as well as the systematic racism leading to the death of two people. It also connects an online article by Warren J. Blumenfeld to the book written by Rebecca Skloot. Both have a central theme of white privilege and racism, but Blumenfeld appears to believe that racism and white privilege feed off of each other while Skloot simply reports examples of past instances of racism that still have an impact today.
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In his article A Tiered System of Justice, the Veil, & “Double Consciousness”, Warren J. Blumenfeld suggests that people of color are stereotyped as criminals, leading to a higher number of situations where blacks are injured or even killed by cops simply for being black. Blumenfeld supports this…
In the case of Eric Garner, for example, a black man was choked to death by a white cop simply for selling loose cigarettes on a street corner in Staten Island. Garner, who was grabbed from behind by Officer Daniel Pantaleo and held in a headlock leading to death by asphyxiation, cried several times in the few seconds before his death that he could not breathe, but the officer never let go. While the selling of loose cigarettes is an infraction of the law in the state of New York, it is not one punishable by death. The attack on Garner was unprovoked, and caused by an innate fear within whites that blacks are more likely to be violent, leading to an unnecessary death. Had Garner been white, he more than likely would not have been killed. In this instance, white privilege is exemplified in the fact that white people do not have to concern themselves on whether or not their activity looks illegal out of a not unfounded fear of situations such as…
Whites, in most cases, are blind to the racism still in the world. Most are more than aware of the old forms of racism (enslavement, legal segregation, lynching, etc.), but are blind to the modern forms (victim-blaming, contact avoidance, denial of cultural differences, etc.) (Blumenfeld, 2015). It seems that, while whites are unknowingly enjoying the privileges given to them at birth, they are also unknowingly learning inherent, hidden racism. Society as a whole is inundated with hidden accusations towards blacks, surreptitiously painting them as violent criminals. White children are sometimes warned to stay away from blacks, and are thus taught from an early age that people of color are not to be associated with and are either dangerous, lesser, or in some cases both. Most whites are sheltered in the fact that they cannot see past their advantages to see the disadvantages of not only blacks, but people of all colored nationalities, all of whom are victim of a society riddled with subliminal…
