Week of Sept. 22-26

This week we talked about an article entitled "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness", which centers on the facts that it is a combination of public policy and private prejudice that have created a "possessive investment in whiteness", which is the reason for the existence of racial hierarchies in our society (Lipsitz, vii). It speaks of Whiteness as having a cash value that benefits those who are socially identified as being "white" and that those people are, in turn, better off by investing in their own Whiteness and keeping the advantages over other classes and races in this country. 

It seems to me that Whiteness is not only something that those inside the parameters of the term "white" depend on for their continued advantage in society. It also seems that the establishments of power, like the governments and large corporations, depend on this concept in order to gain some type of meaning and to keep control in an ever-globalizing world. Even if the government and these corporations are headed by a majority "white" group of people, they still need the system for reasons other than personal advantage, which they already have. With this article, we talked again about the concept of power as was theorized by Michel Foucault. We spoke of the relationship between those who hold the power and how it is through the racial hierarchy that this power is maintained. Mainly, this was just how race being biologically determined, humans have associated with that the message that one race is better than another and that it is fit to "rule" over all those underneath it. In the article, it speaks about how whiteness is essentially a social fact, an identity that is created and continues to harm those who don't fall into its boundaries. I want to succeed on my own, not because I could be socially identified as "white". 

For this same day, we also watched American History X (1998), which is a movie directed by Tony Kaye that stars Edward Norton as a Nazi, quasi-KKK member who goes to prison for what he has done and comes out a changed man after his experiences with members of other races and with those who were also Nazis (Nazi being one who wishes to follow Nazi doctrine). I love this movie as Edward Norton is one of my favorite actors and he is brilliant in this film. The racial tension and his ability to change and to recognize what he has been doing is absolutely ridiculous is one of the best examples on film to date.

Brady