Structural Racial Inequity Essay

The concept of racial bias –more specifically implicit or subconscious racial bias– has received increased attention over the years as racial and ethnic gaps in achievement (largely educational and economic), treatment, and survival outcomes persevere despite the expansion of concerted efforts to focus on the social determinants of health (SDOH) and combating longstanding, overt discriminatory barriers and practices. The increased interest in as well as investments made within the study of implicit or “hidden” biases is largely attributed to the field of social psychology and the research of practitioners like Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt and Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, whose work have emphasized the importance of focusing on the role that contextual environmental factors and social conditioning play, rather than just explicit racial attitudes, in explaining the persistence of racial inequality.

Over the last century, farming has changed exponentially, transforming food production. During the late 1800s, the industrial revolution revitalizes agriculture by bolstering crop and livestock productivity, spurring the second agricultural revolution. This revolution marks the creation of a commercial market for food. (Knox, 334) The third agricultural revolution, occurring after World War II, introduces mechanization, chemical farming, and manufacturing processing that still exists today; therefore, marking the transition from the family owned and operated farms to commercial farms. “Back around the turn of the last century, the average farmer could feed six or eight people. Now the average American farmer can feed 126 people” (Kenner). The standardization of fast food reconstructed the food preparation system. McDonald’s Speedee Service System introduced manufacturing production lines into a restaurant, transforming the farming into a food industry. (Knox, 341) Even though most food sold in supermarkets and restaurants is cultivated on corporate lands, surprisingly, farming is still believed to be a family business with locals living in small farmhouses.

According to RHI-Hub.com, Access to healthy and reasonable food can be a challenge for rural residents, unrelatedly of income level. Due to financial factors such as a low capacity of trades, many rural areas lack food shops and could be considered “food deserts.” Which are areas where there is limited availability of fresh, affordable foods. People who shop at rural communities may trust on less expensive and less nutritious options, such as those available at a gas station convenience store, than take a long drive to the grocery store that stocks fresh produce, milk, eggs, and other staples. In this paper I’m going to be talking about the effects of food deserts and how it effects peoples lives, how being in Rural cities such

The food industry is the worldwide diversified industry which has to do with anything relevant with food from food education to marketing but principally the industry produces and or provides food to essentially all people on the planet. The only people who are excluded from the food industry are self-sustaining farmers and hunter-gatherers. It is one of the largest industries in the world and continues to grow because people need food and the population is increasing every day. In America, the food industry possesses such an important role, yet there are so many problems within the industry which is ruining the society as we know it. Countless social issues within America today can be traced back to the food industry. Although

Many individuals today have different point of views on how the United States of America became what it is today. For instance, point of views such as how society learned to function the way it does, the law and order in place, and ultimately, how circumstances have developed throughout history. Unfortunately, institutional/institutionalized racism, also known as systemic racism is also a concept that has settled and is grown to be quite predominant in the United States all through times past. Systemic racism continues to take place in settings such as banks, courts of law, government organizations, school systems, and the like. However, similar to any other challenge, there are steps to end systemic racism.

Racial inequality has plagued our society for centuries and has been described as a “black eye” on American history. It wasn’t until the passing of The Civil Rights Act of 1965 that minorities were given equal protection under the law. This was a crucial step on our society’s road to reconciling this injustice. However, the effects of past racial inequality are still visible to this day, and our society still wrestles with how to solve this issue. In 1965, President Lyndon B Johnson said: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still just believe that you have been completely fair. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity––not legal equity but human ability––not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result” (Garrison-Wade & Lewis, 2003). That same year, President Johnson signed an executive order mandating government contractors “take affirmative action” in

Many people claim that racism no longer exists; however, the minorities’ struggle with injustice is ubiquitous. In the “Anything Can Happen With Police Around”: Urban Youth Evaluate Strategies of Surveillance in Public Places,” Michelle Fine and his comrades were inspired to conduct a survey over one of the major social issues - how authority figures use a person’s racial identity as a key factor in determining how to enforce laws and how the surveillance is problematic in public space. In the beginning of the article, she used the existed survey reports to support and justify their purpose to perform this survey. The survey analyzed urban youth interactions with authority figures, comprising police, educators, social workers and security guards.

In the case of Brown vs. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was not legal to keep public schools segregated by race. This was a significant success for minority students, but they still have a long way to go (“...Look…”). In 2015, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released data that included a statistic stating that 40% of the enrollment for schools that had gifted programs was Black and Latino students, but only 26% of those students were in the gifted programs (Hsieh). Gary Orfield wrote on a similar topic that “We have become a nation that accepts...unequal [classrooms]” (Orfield). A lot of racial minority student are separated into different classes with a lower standard of education, even if they should be in a more advanced course (Darling-Hammond). Racial disparity in advanced courses in high schools today is caused by students of color not being in gifted programs earlier in their education; being one of the only students of their race can make racial minority students feel isolated and uncomfortable and the disparity limits opportunities for them in their future.

Racial issues are sometimes dismissed as history; they are thought of as issues of the past. People sometimes believe that since the government preaches equality, that most racial issues are resolved. This is not the case in today’s society, as racial issues are still prevalent in everyday life. Not only facing discriminatory practices in the job market, minorities face racism in many different aspects of everyday life. In the world we live in today, people tend to judge a whole group of people based on the actions of only a few. It is ironic that in the country that was founded on immigrants from every corner of the world can have people that discriminate against those that are from different ethnicities than them. There is a significant

From history of hundreds of decades, we have witnessed the great progress made by human, in technology and in society. But injustice always exists everywhere in this world. Injustice and unfair treatment could not be erased from the world easily. Just like the situation described by John Steinbeck, the immigrants faced injustice. But there are too many injustices that even worse in the world. In general, there are 5 main injustices in our world.

Racial equalities are when people of tied to poverty and tied to race, possibly even more than in other Eastern North Carolina rural communities where blacks and Latinos typically experience higher rates of poverty than their white counterparts.Overall, black and Latino residents of North Carolina are much more likely to live in poverty than white North Carolinians. In the state, 27.7 percent of African-Americans live in poverty, while 34 percent of Latinos do, according to an analysis by the N.C. Budget and Tax Center. Less than 12 percent of the state’s white population lives in poverty. Those rates go up even higher for children

Two factors that contribute to health disparities among ethnic groups is the lack of access to fresh food and the infrequency of health care coverage within ethnic groups.

I didn’t think that symbolic interaction applied here because it is more of a micro analysis, and structural-functionalism is about how aspects of society are functional and work in harmony, which also does not apply to this topic. This approach is about analyzing the inequalities of aspects in the social world such as race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation etc., and the issues that stem from them. I believe that in the realm of racial inequality, this perspective ties in with it the most due to the nature of “conflict” that is deeply embedded in its foundation. Racial inequality is an example of social conflict because of the divide that is caused between various races. In this case specifically, the divide between white America and the rest of the minority groups comprising America. There are still factors that have only been erased on the surface but still play a large role in the way that people of color are treated in America, and dictate to a certain extent, compromise the “freedom” that people have. On the other hand, we have white America, who have heightened chances of achieving anything that they please. This does not apply to every white American, as there are also white Americans who are living on or below the poverty line, and much like everybody else must put in a lot of effort to reach certain heights, however they have an advantage over all other denomination of people known as “white privilege” which are the societal benefits that people who can be categorized as “white” enjoy over the rest of the population and in the end, have a higher social status. Ultimately, people of color must work harder, and face many more setbacks in their climb to success than white Americans do, which is not fair,

Cafeteria food in schools is made to be healthy for students, but is it really healthy for students if they think it is foul and do not want to eat it? Should schools change the healthy foods to foods that students would actually want to eat? School food’s job is to be healthy and tasty to get the students through their day, but sadly school lunches tend to miss the mark on both accounts. Public schools rely on money from the government to supply food to their students, but due to several cutbacks the thing served in the cafeteria is hardly food at all. We all know the stereotypical school food mystery meat Monday or a slab of grey mush and sadly that is not too far from what it is in reality. Even with the “healthy” options most school supply is packed with harmful preservatives and chemicals that harm our youth from buying the cheapest possible edible green thing. As a country does not seem to want to invest into healthy and better futures for our young people.

The health issue we will discuss is residential segregation. This is the physical separation of two or more groups into different neighborhoods, or a form of segregation that “sorts population groups into various neighborhoods contexts and shapes the living environment at the neighborhood level. In addition, we will discuss a health disparity, which is defined as inequalities that exist when members of certain population groups do not benefit from the same health status as other groups. Racial residential segregation is a fundamental cause of racial disparities in health. The degree of residential segregation remains high for most African Americans in the U.S. The primary cause of racial differences in socioeconomic status is by determining