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Pratyush Sambar Shakya

Mr. Brandon Martin
Social Issues
2/20/2018

Power, Privilege and Race

The United States is proud to represent itself as the “Land of the free and home of the brave.” A

land where people can come together and live in social harmony, bound together by the force that regards

everyone as equals and holds them together as a cohesive group. A place where people can leave their

social identities behind to form their own identity. However, reality check suggests that the United States

of America has never been able to stand by its beliefs. The maxim that it proudly manifests has never

been justified by its actions. Races and ethnicities have never been able to come together without the

nexus of superiority and inferiority rooted in them. Throughout history, America has established itself as

an institution of oppression which uses forces of social control to ensure the exploitation by one race over

other, superiority of one color over other and the domination of one gender over another. The land of the

free has people who are captive of their identities and the home of the brave which has individuals afraid

of their own individualities.

The system of oppression in the United States is a gradual process which, like everywhere else,

initially starts at an individual level. An individual oppression refers to an attitude or action of an

individual in a dominant group that reflects prejudice against members of a subordinate social group. For

instance, an African American boy who got caught in bed with a white prostitute was proclaimed a

“mighty, mighty lucky bastard” because the boy received a very lenient punishment of being castrated

from the town. (Wright, the ethics of Jim Crow living) The very statement and its irony are enough to

prove that racism has a very strong grip on the American society. The eloquence through which the

dominant person has been able to take control of racism is very fascinating and may be a strong force that
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promotes individual racism, as he is able to come off as a compassionate person while being able to

outcast the subordinate from society itself.

The oppression that initially started at an individual level slowly starts to transcend into a greater

level and takes the form of institutional oppression. Institutional oppression is quite different from

individual level as it refers to the systematic mistreatment of a minority or subordinate group by a

dominant group which is further supported and enforced by the society and its institutions. Institutional

oppression occurs when established laws and practices reflect bias on a certain individual solely based on

the individual’s membership in subordinate social identity groups. One of the most conspicuous groups of

individuals that face institutional oppression in the United States is the African American community and

one of the most prominent institutions that institutionally oppress the African Americans are the public

defenders themselves, the police force. Records show that African-Americans comprise only 13% of the

U.S population ad 14% of the monthly drug users but are 37% of the people arrested for drug related

offenses in America which clearly represents the discrimination and oppression of African-Americans in

an institutional oppression in the United States.

The last and the full-fledged form of oppression takes the form of societal oppression. Societal

oppression describes a dominant and subordinate relationship between groups of people in which the

dominant group uses various social tools like social norms, roles, rituals, language, art to dominate the

subordinated group and benefit from systematic abuse, exploitation, and prejudice directed towards the

subordinate group. People who experience oppression based on race or ethnicity often internalize the

ideology which further assists to promote the societal oppression. They may come to terms that they

indeed are inferior and less worthy than the dominant groups.

Societal racism prominently began in the United States in 1969 in Jamestown, Virginia when the

Dutch nations of Europe brought slaves to America to cultivate farms and harvest lucrative plantations.

Since, the United States has rigidly defined the black and white color line which enforced white as a

“pure” category and others with any racial intermixture as “nonwhite.” This principle, where each man is

assigned to a social box based on a genetic tracery of a very long period of evolution is categorized as
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Hypo descent. (Omi and Winant, Racial Formations) The fate of a person in America has always been

defined by the color of one’s skin and cursed are those who have traces of black ancestry in them. African

Americans were subject to discrimination and violence then and still are now. Societal oppression was

evident back in the day as Africans Americans who spoke out or seemed to gain social class were subject

to lynching, the act of illegal execution for an alleged offense mostly without a legal trial, to prevent them

from climbing the ladders in the society. Some 3515 lynchings of black men and black women were

recorded for the years 1882 to 1927 and many more did not get recorded (Feagin, Slavery unwilling to

die). Lynchings are abolished now and so is slavery but African Americans still are subject to oppression

in various other ways.

Throughout the events in history, there have been enough events to show that the world is a cruel

and dark place for those who are born unfair and oppression seems to be the central focus of the

unfairness. However, the one thing that no one can dispute is that no matter the race, color or gender, each

one of us are equal. We have fought with ourselves enough to prove that all of us are equal when this

ideology should have been of a second nature to us. The legislation has passed enough bills and the

people have raised their voices loud enough to articulate it but there are still cases of racism evident in the

society. Decades of war in racism has still not proved enough to remind people that we share a common

brotherhood, and neither will the upcoming wars on coming years until. No amount of laws, wars or

protest can end oppression unless people can harness self-realization of equality and fairness among

people from within.

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Bibliography

 “11 Facts About Racial Discrimination.” DoSomething.org | Volunteer for Social Change,

www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-racial-discrimination.

 Rothenberg, Paula S, and Soniya Munshi. Race, class, and gender in the United States: An

Integrated Study. Worth Publishers/Macmillan Learning, 2016.