race video post

Ricky woodie
Ethics 101
Video blog
4 September 2007

blog


In this video the author’s thesis is that because of racism in the past, whites and other races remain segregated today. The video first focuses on American citizenship, stating that you are not considered a citizen of the United States unless you were white ( white skin, hair color, stature, religion etc.). They developed scientific theories to justify who was white. An Asian man Ozawa tried to fight for his citizenship by stating that he was American because he raised himself and his family like whites. And another man had scientific proof, proving he was white. Both were denied because the gov’t stated that whiteness is what the common white person says it is. In white peoples eyes Jewish people were not white until compared to African Americans. The second part of the movie dealt with housing. After World War II many soldiers came back looking for homes to raise their family. These soldiers were both white and black. The government developed suburbs that were cheaper and were places for soldiers to live. The government decided that they didn’t want minorities moving in because it wouldn’t work socially and economically. The minorities were put into “vertical ghettos” (developments in cities) which conditions were not as good as in the suburbs. In 1968 LBJ decided this was not fair and allowed the minorities to move into the suburbs. This didn’t work out because real estate agents would pay off the whites if they would move out once the blacks and others moved in. This caused the white flight and once again we had segregation. Since whites began to move out of neighborhoods where minorities moved in, the value of the homes would go down. Thus, causing the net worth to go down for minorities and the net worth for whites to go up. This means that since the value to be white was now higher it has passed down in generations and the lower value of minorities has passed down as well.
The question for this argument is can we really end this segregation and cause equality among races? I think we can but it will take a lot of time. We have to not ignore race but except it first. Then slowly integrate races and let them realize race will not affect the economy economically. We need to slowly build up the big hole that we dug.
Once again in this video I felt disgusted. Its hard for me to see how people can be this ignorant and I was amazed by some of the things done in the past. Before this video I was not aware of the “white by law”, or how the New Deal was set up to only benefit whites. The part about how the Jews were not white until compared to blacks was funny to me because I find myself in a similar situation today. I have many friends black and white. I have friends that are on the extremes of both ends. I have white friends that are segregated for the most part and black friends that are as well. Then I also have white and black friends that get along amongst each other. My white friends on the far extreme view me as white when talking about other races and my black friends tell me I am not white when they talk down on white races, they say I am Arabic. I agree with this video that what we did in the past still causes race issues today that most of America is not aware of.