Structural Racism
During the podcast and the readings, what I really got out of them was that all these schools with predominately black and brown students, have high rates of violence, criminality, and expulsions in schools. During the podcast, they mention how children living in poverty go to an underfunded school is a recipe for disaster. From the reading these students are harassed with metal detectors, the teachers, threatened, and harassed, and many people wonder why these children are violent. In “So You Want to Talk about Race”, they explain how these kids are already living in trauma with their outside life with poverty and seeing their parents struggle. On top of that, once they are at the school, a bunch of like minded individuals start to create trouble, in which they do not know better. These schools are even underfunded and do not provide the best education that another school with great accomplishments. The concept that I thought was a great idea was the reading from “A Perilous Path”, where rather than funding the schools that have the higher test grades and accomplishments, they should award the school who has less expulsions. This way, the school system can figure out why this specific school is expelling more students than this school. To me, this is a structure issue because during the readings and podcast, they explain that most of these colored students are living in poverty and do not have the right resources that they need to become successful. Since they are at the bottom of the social class, it is difficult for them to get the motivation that they need to strive for success. During “A Perilous Path”, they reference how easy it is to manipulate students attending underfunded school with drugs, alcohol, or joining gangs. This issue is a whole cycle that plagues a lot of the youth who have problems with their life.
In my community partnership where I volunteer at UP Canal, I believe that these kids go there to become more motivated to strive for success and to get tutored extra to learn more. The structures that I feel negatively effect the people I am working with are the government benefits that they are not allowed to receive. I am guessing that these families probably do not have adequate healthcare they need or a good schooling system. With this in mind, it is difficult for families to keep their children happy and although they are working lots of hours to keep food on the table, these children could turn to violence as their answer to all their pain. Since their parents are mostly working and do not have time to be with their children, these kids could often look up to the older kids as role models and see that they’re taking drugs or fighting each other, and if they become influenced, it is just the cycle over again. Since these kids are spending extra hours at canal, our job is to help distract them from the bad things that happen in their community and to help them become free thinkers. I tied this into “A Perilous Paths” reading because they talk about how the cycle of violence continues in the youth.
It is important to analyze the structural cause of social issues because we can obviously see that black and brown people make up a huge sum of the poverty levels in America. This in time influences the youth by looking up to that gangster neighbor that they have and they would want to be apart of it. What gangs always tell the youth is that they will protect them and they are treated like family. This disillusionment makes the children feel safe and it is actually the opposite because all the older gang members would make them commit crimes or do illegal substances. This transforms the child to become ruthless and unmotivated to do anything productive. This cycle continues if they have a child because again, the child will be exposed to the violence that happens in their neighborhood. Although I have not worked with my community partner yet, I believe that the people living in the ghettos have a hard life in their community because it is difficult to hide the atrocities and violence that happen in their front lawn. It has helped me expand on the structural issues because most of the people living on Canal Street are brown skinned, and if you compare it to where I live, I can tell that the people living on Canal Street do not get the benefits that they need to become successful.
