Ben Shapiro Takes on Institutional Racism and White Privilege

Ben Shapiro’s argument that racism can only be fought against by confronting individuals sounds awesome and romantic. I love stories in which people come together to bring down a common enemy that is absolutely evil.

However, that isn’t how the world works. There are over 7.5 billion people living on this planet, and not one of them is an evil person. Evil by definition, is the intentional and needless causing of suffering upon others. Nobody thinks of themselves as evil, but their actions may be seen as evil. 

Studying Whiteness

On the homework for Sept. 18th, I began the Critical Thinking question with, “I suppose that I am white within a social context.”, as opposed to directly stating, “I am white”. Answering that question felt rather awkward, since I don’t think or feel any identity of “whiteness”. Reading this made me wonder if members of minority groups have their minority status imprinted onto their identity in a way that the dominant group doesn’t. Of course I recognize that race exists (as a social construct only based on arbitrary physical traits). However, I do look forward to a society that only “judges [the individuals that make it up] on the content of their character”. I’m not sure if this is the same or related to, as the textbook mentioned, being “color-blind” and/or “race-neutral” and distancing myself from the very real struggles these people face. My intention is to help them and everyone to achieve that future eutopia in which race, as a concept, is something people find in history books (hologram computers?) and know existed in our minds, but can’t fully understand it the way we do today.

Becoming 'White'

I took Intro to Sociology during my first semester of undergrad. I remember the professor explaining how the Irish and Italians emigrated to the United States in the 19^th Century and “became white” in the 20^th. At this point, the concept of race as a social construct dividing people based on arbitrary physical features was extremely profound in my mind. This made me question the process of “becoming white”. I asked him why these Irish and Italians (as well as Poles, Greeks, Russians, etc.) became white if they only landed in the Americas from the 1830’s-1930's, but African-Americans, who were forced onto American plantations beginning all the way back in 1619, couldn’t. His response was something along the lines of, “the Irish and Italians could pass off as white more easily than African-Americans.” There was a pause (perhaps longer in my mind than it actually was) in which I asked the most obvious question imaginable. Whites are white; they have light skin, even if they are not northwestern European. Blacks are black; they have dark skin.