Reflection on the intersection of race and labor.

I never thought about the intersection of race and labor until this class in much detail. I understood that racially marginalized people were kept on the bottom of the U.S. "caste" system almost consistently, but I never quite delved into the systems, stereotypes, tactics and history of these races and how it coincides with the transformation or modification of the labor system and how the system attempts to maintain the status quo even by contradicting itself at various points. Beforehand, I viewed capitalism as an equally draining system. It's a system that submits the poorer to toil on the behalf of the rich who aggregate funds and grossly use them to abuse the rest of the populace. But, this class has demonstrated through examples, literature and reasoning that capitalism disproportionately affects people who are not white. Capitalism almost tailors itself to keeping people down through the most accessible, outward and superficial of means simply because it is the easiest to maintain. Unfortunately, this medium is tended through race, gender and other superficial differences that are blown into a distorted proportion by current media and moguls. The inequality we experience and recognize (or stubbornly deny in the case of some conservative relatives!) today has origins and continued to survive and thrive through history, sometimes suddenly changing course for the sake of filling the bottom of a pyramid. For example, the film Ethnic Notions taught me the evolution of stereotypes and how the docile, almost clueless slave evolved into an aggressive brute the moment emancipation was earned. It taught me how immigration limits and migratory deception, committed by the United States and business people, existed solely for cheap labor purposes. A lot of the race problems we deal with are coincided with capitalism, but the "ingredients" (which are fictitious and nonexistent) of success and their lack of possession are often used to justify the racial thinking and logic that perpetuates the prejudiced, capitalistic minds of America. This class taught me an important lesson about struggle. We all do struggle, struggling "equally" is fictitious and deceitful from learning the actual truth and preoccupies us with struggling for ourselves when the key to total freedom is solidarity amongst the working class. Unfortunately, because capitalism's self-determined/bootstraps system is sufficient motivation for selfishness, intentionally or unintentionally, we are too blind to recognize the obvious fragments the capitalistic government and industries have carved and cleaved for us. As a result, we are left to compete with each other for scraps of cultural fulfillment while others are handicapped in truly life-changing ways because of their race, class and gender. This class helped me understood both the origins of racial inequality, the capitalistic thinking behind it, and America's involvement in covering up and perpetuating a brutally unequal system.