Final Thoughts

This class did well to fill the gaping holes of knowledge (once thought to be minor gaps) I had about laboring minority groups, and the circuitous system of capitalism that sets migrant workers in perpetual motion on a hamster wheel—running, running, running, but never quite arriving. I held vague ideas as to what race, labor, and migration looked liked as broad, disparate concepts, but not from a synthesized, ground-level view, linking each in indirect (and sometimes very direct) relation with one another.

The relationship between capitalism as a primary proponent of racism, and all the ways in which it works to condemn certain racial groups to remain forever stunted within a bottom-barrel tier (and even the creation of this bottom-barrel tier) is heavily rooted in protection of property and of unfair redistribution of the land after the abolishment of slavery and during industrialization—a relationship that continues to prevail within our “post-racist” society. Perhaps the best questions this class has taught me to ask deal with the longstanding social norms and characterizations we place upon ethnic minorities, that, even to this day, continues to serve a global, economic function. The narrative the U.S. paints of its global past creates a picture so grossly oppositional to the proletarian accounts and scholarly critiques we’ve laced together over the quarter, I’ve had to pretty much reconfigure my whole conception of what the U.S. is. But, if this class is built on a few major themes, I’ve found that one of them is certainly related to defining just that: what makes America? White supremacy? Check. The “stranger”? Check. The migrant laborer? Check. Capitalism? Very much so, check. But, what about the ideology of a better future? To what extent does this ‘better future’ exist for racial groups whose opportunities are predetermined by their role, both created and patrolled, in the nation’s economic system?