Forward The Perils of Racial Prophecy Crime is that conduct a society finds threatening and when that conduct is that of persons of color it is as the essays in this book make painfully clear particularly threatening the actor becoming a greater danger than the deed I have concluded sadly but with great certainty that racism in America is a permanent phenomenon Civil rights this view is rejected out of hand by civil rights professionals and those who pursue despite all the dream that we shall overcome The civil rights gains so hard won are being steadily eroded Despite undeniable progress for many no persons of color are insulated from incidents of racial discrimination Introduction The Power of Images Far more empirical studies have addressed African Americans experiences with crime and criminal injustice than those of any other group When people and perhaps especially Euro Americans think about race they think of African Americans A consequence of this focus on AA has been the practice by the US Census Bureau and local police departments and courts until very recently to record ethnicity as white nonwhite or black white other It was only with the 2000 Census that US population counts included categories for multiethnic and multiracial responses Race It is a social construction It is not a fixed identity it is socially decided rather than biologically determined Racial categories and the meanings attached to race make sense only in their historical contexts and in light of specific social relations Racial dynamics are flexible fluid and always political Racism Is socially constructed It is all about power Because conditions of dominance and subordination and of control and resistance differ across social and historical contexts racism too must be multifaceted and flexible Social practices which explicitly or implicitly attribute merits or allocate values to members of racially categorized groups solely because of their race Omni Winant Petite Apartheid Realities These are the everyday activities that contribute to poor relations between the police and persons of color such as routine stop and question or stop and frisk law enforcement practices AA have been the victims of a particularly virulent form of racism because of their early status as slaves and because their continued economic plight has resulted in substantial media attention to segregated urban communities characterized by poverty single parent families poor schools and visible street crimes Racial Formation The process by which people attach meaning and importance to racial categories At the individual level it is part of the process by which people formulate their identities When we think about racial information this way it becomes clear that race plays a central role in social relations and cannot be reduced to something else such as socioeconomic class or nationality At the societal level it is structural based on social relations between groups Intersectionality of Race An AA woman is never just black she is also always a woman and she is never just a woman she is also always black To do this risks splitting the person in two Describes how each person simultaneously experiences racial and gender oppression at the individual level Exploitation Marginalization Powerlessness The process whereby the work performed by one group benefits a different group Ex slavery Is a more common form of oppression than exploitation Marginals are people the system of labor cannot or will not use Refers to the daily situation of those who have little or no control over their working conditions They can make few if any decisions in the workplace and are not allowed any creativity in designing the work product or even in deciding how best to do their work Everyone and everything is gendered but it is the presence of women in certain settings that reminds us that we have taken the presence of men and the invisibility of men for granted Ironically it is the very invisibility of race when we are talking about Euro Americans and of gender when we are talking about men that should signal that we are dealing with a social construction Chapter 1 American Indians in Popular Culture Non Indians have presented Indians as either demonic or untainted children of nature Known as squaw buck savage redskin heathen loafer and drunk Rich cultural heritages continue to shape our worldviews customs and values in an often hostile and complex world that demands conformity in thought action and deed Millennia Our traditions on the North American continent preceded the first arrival of European colonizers in the late 1400s by millennia A period of a thousand years Words that deny us humanity include squaw buck savage redskin heathen loafer and drunk Personal Experiences Words and phrases such as incompetent unworthy beneficiary of affirmative action backwards stupid superstitious and lazy have been used to describe American Indians Generally the popular genre of the western that dominated Hollywood throughout much of the last century offered the viewing public image of Indians that was popularized in the 18th and 19th centuries Presented Indians as savage barriers to western expansion Historical Development of Stereotypes Trail of Tears Because they suffered the loss of about a third of their population the Cherokees called their forced removal from Georgia to the Indian Territory this The average citizen benefits more from federal programs than an Indian Under Columbus reign of terror as Spanish viceroy and governor of the island of Hispaniola from 1493 to 1500 more than half a million natives died from harsh treatment execution warfare or diseases The development of the printing press played an important role in the dissemination of mental images of Indians throughout Europe Slanted reports of contacts with Indians written by European explorers and colonizers gave readers biased and fantasized descriptions of Indian behavior and culture Other stereotypes painted pictures of Indians as human monsters Symbols of Indians in artwork included bows and arrows instruments representative of death and destruction feathers denoting natives living in nature and nudity signifying promiscuity other pictures depicted them as childlike living without morality and bestial 19th century U S society offered Indians two choices perish or give way Settlers moving to the frontier tended to espouse the first solution When Indians offered armed resistance to preserve their