During our discussion about chapter one from the Marger text, someone brought up the point about the human tendency of categorizing people. I completely agree with this concept, that it is engrained in us to feel more comfortable if we can place a person in a certain group. That way we can enable our preconceived notions (stereotypes) to figure out this person before really knowing them and we can put our walls way up and maintain our comfort level. While I am admitting this is a true fault of human nature, not something I am proud of and something all of us, I am sure, are working to eliminate, my mind couldn’t help but think of ways in which this kind of thinking is instituted, even fueled. Then my mind went to the Affirmative Action legislation that we have in the U.S. This legislation was rooted in the 1960’s under the Kennedy administration with the Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity. This idea was intensified with other forms of legislation including the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 which established the four-fifths rule, meaning that firms contracting with the federal government should not be allowed to hire any race, sex, or ethnic group at a rate below four-fifths that of any other group. Affirmative Action laws have morphed throughout the years, but the principal is still evident.
I definitely see how this legislation is beneficial to minorities, including myself as a woman. I believe it was needed during the time that it was passed (a time where gender, racial, and ethnic minorities were subject to major abuse in their fight for equality) and that it was a milestone for the federal government to step in and defend minorities. But now, looking at it though a 2011 lens, I see this legislation not as racism eliminator, but a racism enabler. This forces us to categorize ourselves to reap the benefits that the federal government has provided us, just to turn around and say that categorizing is wrong. What pride is there in receiving a job, if you know that a more qualified person (white male) didn’t receive it because you were hired to fill a quota? In this system reverse racism is the effect. I feel that this system puts anti-racist sentiment at a halt because the federal government has made it a requirement to categorize. How can we as humans defeat our archetypal tendency and dispose of our general assumptions of stereotypes attached to groupings of people, if we have legislation that forces us to retreat back to this way of thinking?
Very interesting connections between the readings and the issue of affirmative action, which is always a highly debated topic. We will examine it more fully in class in due time. What you post is really asking us to consider is the positives and negatives of the fact that we are socialized to categorize others and that society itself is structured around such categories. But can we completely dispense with categories altogether? To categorize or not to categorize--that is the question.
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