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Course: Wireless Philosophy > Unit 3
Lesson 2: Political- Political: Original Position
- Political: Race and the Carceral State
- Political: Race and Racist Institutions
- Political: Government and Marriage (Government's Role)
- Political: The Prisoner's Dilemma
- Political: Tragedy of the Commons
- Political: Collective Action Problems
- Political: What are Public Goods?
- Political: Government and Marriage (Minimal Marriage)
- Political: Government and Marriage (Friends with Legal Benefits)
- Political: Government and Marriage (Polyamory)
- Political: Government and Marriage (Just Care)
- Political: Why Vote? Reasons to Vote
- Political: Should We Have Children?
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Political: Race and the Carceral State
Why do people see mass incarceration as a racial problem? What does race have to do with incarceration and what does either have to do with philosophy?
Speaker: Olufemi Taiwo, UCLA.
Speaker: Olufemi Taiwo, UCLA.
Want to join the conversation?
- Much as I applaud addressing this difficult problem, I don't think it belongs with the rest of the philosophy videos in this section. For one it is too specific - about present day USA problems. Perhaps it deserves its own separate directory, where is could be expanded?(6 votes)
- How can education play a role in allowing people to change perspectives on the role of modern-day race in incarceration?
I think now, we denounce segregation throughout our education system in order to make sure that later generations don't start it up again and I think that's a good thing. Maybe we should start healthy, tolerant discussions about race in our classrooms, especially in places with racial tension. In my school, we have debates about current event issues. I don't think we should push on people left-wing and liberal values of standing up to racism because that would a lot of people uncomfortable, but I do think we should talk about it in mature middle school and high school settings. Does anyone have any other thoughts on how education could affect this issue? Does anyone think there might be a good chance that such discussions in classrooms with racial tensions could break out into fights or is that improbable or preventable if we have our discussions in the right way?(3 votes)- We can have these discussions but they also need to be part of our Overall Societal discussions. The problem we have today is that our communities are way too divided on these types of issues. We are raised in this way and we learn to take a side on an issue depending on what area we grew up in. All of these areas are divided along things like Ethnicity, Politics, Social Class and other ideologies that shape and influence our beliefs on everything else. And also a very Important thing to remember is that the Media, Politicians, different Organizations all can benefit from a societies problems in different ways so that is why you will often see different Media outlets or Politicians taking complete opposite sides on an issue and spreading this message to their followers therefore furthering the division.
We need to somehow begin these discussions early on in our Educational systems and societies. We need to teach everyone about our Similarities rather than about always focusing on trivial Differences. We all need the same things in life. We all want to be Happy, Safe & Healthy and we should Only be satisfied when Everyone has this in their lives. So it needs to all start from the beginning. We need a New way of looking at things and how to find solutions for them. It's a Huge Educational Reform that will have to happen over time with Many different discussions had to try and Chip Away at this Giant Divisive Cloud always hanging over us to ever have a chance at coming Together and discussing these topics in a more Sympathetic & Tolerant fashion.(5 votes)
- Is the cause of hyper-policing really racial-stigma?
To me it seems like racial-stigma is merely a byproduct of the racial inequalities that persist in the "circle of hyper-policing".
It starts out with poverty, poverty creates more crime, more crime creates more policing and more incarceration. While incarceration does not help poverty, I wouldn't consider it the main cause of poverty. Poverty was racially unequal to begin with.(3 votes) - Definitions based on race or culture are rarely useful when thinking about self identity.(2 votes)
- It is those who apply laws in carceral state who do not respect these regulations. A black ,a white, a red or a yellow are not treated equally if the judge is of different color.
Race as well as incarceration have to do with ethics in philosophy.(2 votes)
- This is excellent and pertinent information for Politics...esp since the laws of policing, media and other intricacies all effect not only the political process...it affects the social and economic processes as well....Thank you for taking something so difficult and explaining it under 6 minutes.(1 vote)
- I agree with the restructuring of the system. Michigan has the highest rate of wrongful convictions, yet women are overlooked in the exoneration process. It's systemic injustice that goes back to the framing of America.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(intro music) I'm Olufemi O. Taiwo. I'm a graduate student in philosophy at
UCLA, and today I'll be talking about race and the carceral state. We often use racial terms
like "white" and "black." Sometimes we mix these
terms with ones about ethnicity and geographic descriptions,
like nationalities. But ethnicity is primarily defined
by intergroup social definition, and nationality is defined by citizenship. And these don't always conform to the
visual classifications we might expect. Someone who's, for example, Latina could look like this or like this. And someone from Asia could
look like this or like this. We often use race to describe what someone looks like, and so you might think that race is something intrinsic
to a person's body or identity, since your body looks
the same everywhere. But actually, it's more complicated. For example, here we might identify this
person as some kind of exotic ethnicity, which isn't exactly race. But the same person in, say,
Brazil might be called "white." So we need a definition of race that accounts for how it travels,
as Ronke Oke describes it: how racial expectations
and conceptions change based on which social environment we're in. Falguni Sheth's explains race this way: as a technology that works as
a mode or vehicle of division, separation, hierarchy, as opposed to, say, a description of a set of
natural kinds to categories. What's important is that race isn't fundamentally about what
individual people are, but about what this identity
category does for a state or other managerial organization. Jason Stanley uses the
term "managerial state" to refer to a government where
things are organized around efficiency, defined and organized around
the interests and perspectives of the managers, or the people in charge. This is an important term in a world
globally organized around money, influenced by how markets
are regulated and constructed. The leaders of world governments aren't
always themselves businesspeople, but get lots of input in their
decision-making by various interests. One way by which the technologies
of race and incarceration manage is by way of the threat of
incarceration, policing, and criminalization of movement. All of these have disciplinary effects. Racist stigmas might
convince us to accept and perpetuate treatment of some
people of color as inherently criminal, most obvious in the American political context by the epithet "thug" for black
men, and the disproportionate labeling of migrants from Central and
South America as "illegals." This might prime us to accept
their mass incarceration, detention, and deportation
as unproblematic, while also priming those targeted
populations to view it as expected. Douglas Massey and Ta-Nehisi Coates have examined the ways in which now
hyper-policed communities were constructed geographically
by interlocking policies, particularly around housing and zoning. This concentrates poverty
and, as a result, crime which will then seem to justify the
disproportionate policing of those spaces. Loic Wacquant notes the ways in which impoverished communities and prisons
structurally inform each other, which has wide-reaching
social consequences. At least some of those
features seem to have been articulated clearly through artistic means, from the poetry of The
Watts Prophets in the 60s to the music of recent decades, like
Illmatic Illadelph Halflife, The New America
parts one and two, and Black Messiah. We can make two conclusions. One, the justifications for hyper-policing are sociologically circular. Two, if we have a problem with crime, we're probably not going to find
a solution anywhere in this circle. We can view this question
pessimistically or optimistically. If we're pessimists, there
might be nothing we can do. Maybe all we can end up doing is shifting around who is
included, who is excluded, and various ways of
parsing violent identities. But maybe there's reason for optimism. If we think we live in genuine democracy, then race might only function as a
technology if enough people are disposed to accept the marginalization of their fellow citizens on, ultimately,
racial grounds. Chris Lebron has noted that this crucially involves an issue of national character, or the kind of nation a
country would like to be. That is, this presents both a
challenge and an opportunity. Changing a nation's character
comes down to more than proving facts or winning
specific electoral battles. It comes down to motivating everyone to do
the tough work of restructuring systems. Subtitles by the Amara.org community