Deconstructing Racism

From the TED talk show, Baratunde Thurston is keen to deconstruct various perspectives associated with racism, more so as an African American living in the United States in the 21^st century (Thurston, 2019). Ideally, the odds do not seem to be in the black community’s favor, and the slightest mistake would be met with dire consequences. African Americans and other minority groups are primarily subjected to some form of racial prejudice compared to White Americans. The speaker suggests that African Americans are highly likely to be faced with irrelevant charges that primarily spell a high degree of racism (Thurston, 2019).

However, there has been significant progress in the recent past, and as the speaker suggests, we are moving closer to the problem and, hence, a step closer to the solution. Deciphering the various forms of racism headlines that are found in the media, the speaker suggested that they had a common structure; they all contained a subject, action, target, and activity (Thurston, 2019). This is to suggest that there is a form of white supremacy, although not to imply that all white people are racist. Through various strategies, racism can be addressed from a different perspective, and this may involve reversing the roles, especially those that capture structural inequalities. Evidently, law enforcement officers tend to use more force against African Americans compared to White Americans, and perhaps this is a vice in society initiated by racial prejudice in the society (Thurston, 2019).

Racism against African Americans in the United States has been a prevalent challenge, especially when concepts of racial inequalities, attitudes, beliefs, structural inequalities and beliefs differ. As such, there is the need to change the action if racism is to be fully addressed in all its capacities.

References

Thurston, B. (2019, April). How to deconstruct racism, one headline at a time. TED: Ideas worth spreading. https://www.ted.com/talks/baratunde_thurston_how_to_deconstruct_racism_one_headline_at_a_time?language=en

ORDER A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

We’ll write everything from scratch

After watching Baratunde Thurston’s TED talk on racism, connect some of the ideas and concepts from Chapter 12 to the examples from Thurston’s talk.

Deconstructing Racism

Pay attention to both the micro-level problems (i.e., problems in interactions, attitudes, beliefs) and the macro-level problems (i.e., institutions, structural inequalities) in Thurston’s talk.