Reponses - Book Report/Review Example

As children, these white students were conditioned to learn deeply-seated prejudice against black people. One student of this university said: “The Negroid race is mentally and morally inferior to the Caucasian race” (“Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter at UGA”). Where would he get this kind of thinking? I do not believe that people are born to have prejudice. These people grew in an environment, where adults around them taught them to think this way about black people- to see them as inherently inferior to whites.

The racist ideology of their environment made it difficult for them to accept racial integration policies. In addition, “old liberal values” could not align equal economic and social opportunities for all races (Carmines and Merriman 244). It might seem counterintuitive to see liberal values as equal to discrimination, but values that enforce strong “economic individualism” did not sit well with integrationist attitudes (Carmines and Merriman 244). Society is to be blamed for racial prejudice and how it divided supposedly educated people between being pro-white and pro-black.

Given these racial attitudes, the integration cannot be done in a staggered manner, and it was understandable that violence would erupt. For centuries, blacks were seen and treated as slaves and secondary citizens. To see them studying in a respectable university must truly gnaw at the patience of the prejudiced whites. Perhaps, it would have helped if greater discussion was taken before the admission of Hunter and Holmes, or maybe not. In the end, something has got to give, and it took Hunter and Holmes to give integration its entry into daylight.

Statement #2 by Stanislav Do you believe the Challenges faced by the Civil Rights movement stemmed from evils that were rooted deeply in the structure of society that not only reflected the legacy of slavery but also perpetuated that legacy during subsequent generations by racialized state policies that wove white privilege into the very fabric of American culture and institutions? I agree that the Civil Rights movement did not only experience challenges to their demands for racial equality because of slavery, but also because of racialized state policies that embedded white privilege into the fabric of American culture and institutions.

These policies can be connected to liberalism that favored the economic development of the rich and middle-class white over black citizens. Cook-Martin and Fitzgerald discussed the role of white politics in ensuring “negative discrimination” against minority groups (10). Negative discrimination refers to state policies that provided access to social opportunities to whites more than blacks (Cook-Martin and Fitzgerald 10). Oliver and Shapiro studied the gap between black and white wealth. They described that “1984 dual-income black households earned 77 percent of the income of similar white families, while the black families possessed only 19 percent of the white families' net worth” (Oliver and Shapiro par.2). Many black families invested equities in housing and automobiles, but not liquid assets, unlike their white counterparts (Oliver and Shapiro par.2). Oliver and Shapiro argued that income is not a reliable indicator of wealth because in times of financial difficulties, it cannot help blacks manage