Race culture and identity Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Race culture and identity - Essay Example However, a few scenes later, the same â€Å"gang† member turns up to the police station with the murder weapon. The audience is informed by the prosecution that the â€Å"gang† member is really a concerned citizen who is doing his civic duty to protect the neighbourhood, and Will is left looking, first, shocked, and second, disappointed. Yet, there is no feeling of guilt that registers on Will’s face, the guilt in automatically assuming that this group of black youths can be nothing more than gang-bangers and criminals. What I found particularly challenging about this episode is that, even when the black youth turns out to be an honest citizen, the staging of the scene encourages the audience to sympathize with the lawyers for having accidentally lead the police to the weapon, rather than expressing outrage at the socially constructing binary between the good white man and the bad black man. The reality, which depicts the white man breaking the law and the black man upholding it, is of little importance. In this context, the reality of individual actions is obscured by the construction of race, which posits Whiteness as pure, correct, righteous, and universally good, and Blackness as dirty, illegal, deceptive, criminal, and inherently bad. It is in critically analyzing this construction of Whiteness that will enable a clearer understanding of how power, dominance, and influence continue to be held in white hands. Since the Civil Rights Movement, there have been subsequent movements created to analyze the construction of race, and how these constructions are entrenched and maintained. One of the first movements to emerge was Critical Legal Scholars (CLS), which sought to expose the inconsistencies in legal doctrine to show how these... Since the Civil Rights Movement, there have been subsequent movements created to analyze the construction of race, and how these constructions are entrenched and maintained. One of the first movements to emerge was Critical Legal Scholars (CLS), which sought to expose the inconsistencies in legal doctrine to show how these inconsistencies serve to maintain the class structure of a society; this school of thought relies heavily on the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’, in which certain groups have used social, political, legal, etc. mechanisms to center their values, ideas, and perspectives as the hegemonic ideology. Through the imperial project, Whiteness has become enshrined as the dominant or superior race that has remained relatively unchallenged until present; therefore, the past several centuries have witnessed a radical transformation in inter-racial relations, which went from relative cultural and ethnic isolation to the world that has been shaped into a racial hier archy where whiteness occupies the top and blackness the bottom. Although CLS investigated the multiple systems that constructed whiteness as the center, it did not sufficiently discuss how the power of whiteness stems from its ability to cast itself as invisible and universal, which is a central point of analysis in Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies.