Iamiah Bartlett Dongni Liu SOCI 1501 18 December 2022 Sociology Final Q1: What is institutional racism and what can be done about it? Provide examples of arguments for or against changes to correct institutional racism. Institutional racism is a form of racism that is embedded in societal institutions. This specifically concerns laws and regulations. America has been plagued with institutional racism since the country gained independence in 1776. Although the country has made strides towards eradicating racism. The battle against it is far from over. Institutional racism is what has held racial equality back for centuries now. Institutional racism can come in many forms. The most blatant examples are not common in America currently. Prior to the civil rights act being passed in 1964, there were laws banning black people from attending the same schools, living in the same neighborhoods, and even using the same drinking fountains as white people. The civil rights act led to intuitional racism becoming more “hidden” through language. Many laws and regulations in America disadvantaged racial minorities. Redlining is a now banned practice where population zones that consisted of racial minorities were “redlined”. The minorities in these redlined zones would be denied mortgages, loans, and were considered “devalued” in a sense. People in these redlined areas were never able to leave and move up in society. The damage this caused is still felt today despite redlining being banned for over 50 years. Areas that were labeled redlined have rarely improved, with nearly everyone living there still considered low-income. Even though laws and regulations have been improving, the damage they’ve done through institutional racism can last decades or even centuries after the laws are removed or fixed. Ending institutional racism is no easy task. A good place to start would be the criminal justice system. Minorities, especially black men, have been disadvantaged when it comes to the justice system. Cops stop and arrest black people at a much higher rate than white people and often target them because of the race. One in five black men in the US are in prison today. This does not only affect the people in prison but prevents change from occurring as well. When someone becomes a convicted felon, they lose their rights to vote, this helps lawmakers that promote institutional racism because the minorities who are suffering because of it are silenced. A rework of the criminal justice system is the only way to fix this issue, prisons need to work on the effectiveness on their rehabilitation, and the police system needs to become unbiased. Although segregation has been banned in laws, schools remain segregated. Private schools help segregate white students from minorities. This segregation creates an “invisible” gap between students racially. This negatively affects black students especially and prevents many minorities from succeeding academically. Integration needs to be pushed in the schooling system to bring the next generations of kids to grow up in an integrated environment. Q4: Analyze any major social institution (e.g., family, education, medicine) by using the relevant materials to show a) how any two of the three major theoretical perspectives in sociology (functionalist, conflict, interactionist) help us to most fully understand that institution, and b) how that institution has been shaped by both the broader political-economic system and social movement for social change. Education, specifically schooling has one of the biggest effects on people as they develop in society. Schooling’s importance can be looked at from a functionalist perspective. Functionally, schooling exists to prepare children for adult life. The manifest function of school is to teach kids skills like language comprehension and math, but there is a latent function as well. Kids learn to socialize with other people in school, that is often the period of their day where they are around the most people including people who are socially higher than them like teachers, socially equal people like their peers, and socially lower people like students younger than themselves. Schooling can be viewed from an interactionist perspective as well. Students learn how to navigate society based on the interactions they have in school. They learn rules should be followed and if they’re not, punishment will follow. They learn from interactions they have on the playground and how studying can improve grades in the same way hard work can improve performance. Schooling has changed in ways but is still critiqued in other ways. Schooling is considered outdated in some ways because it does not properly help students enter the workforce. When public schooling first existed, most people entered jobs doing hard labor or on a manufacturing belt. School hours lasted 8 hours to prepare kids to work a 9 to 5 and the idea of listening to your teacher is the same way someone was supposed to listen to their boss. Society has changed since then, and with jobs like engineering for example, the schooling system is not the best way to prepare students for the workforce. Change has come for schools in the last century though. No school in America can be segregated, and affirmative action now exists where minorities are favored over comparable white peers for spots in schooling as a way to provide reparations for past damage to the minority communities.
