Proposal
For my project I’m thinking about using several different primary sources. One of the books I was considering using was Invisible Man by Ellison. The book focuses on a man that is considered invisible because he is black. I would also like to use another book named Between The World and Me by Coats. The book by Coats combats the idea of invisibleness proposed years before by Ellison in 1952. The questions I’m trying to focus on is how race and racism works in the brain. Both these books will help to get to a more definite answer to how race effects whites as well as blacks. I hope that this project will lead to answer my primary question of how race distinctions only exist in the mind and or brain and are not a physical characteristic of humans.
My primary secondary source will be Desmond, Matthew and Mustafa Emirbayer. 2016. Race in America. New York: WW Norton. This is a sociology textbook discussing how race functions in America and advantages and disadvantages associated with race. It also talks about how racist behaviors and actions began in America and how it is a continued phenomenon in a country that claims to be “color blind.” My other secondary source will be BonillaSilva, Eduardo. 2010. Racism Without Racists: ColorBlind Racism & Racial Inequality in Contemporary America. Third Edition. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. This book poses questions related to race and racism in present day situations and offer real life answers by subjects from the study. With further research I hope to find sources that explain how conditioning works in the brain and brain-washing which will lead to a possible explanation of how racism works.
My motive for this project is to understand how racism is taught and not innate. My purpose is simple which is to add to the conservation of how racism is an ongoing phenomenon which needs to be removed in order to have true “equality.” There have been hundreds of books written in multiple styles to address the problem of how racism works in America, but I hope to add to the conversation by exploring how conditioned perspectives help to perpetuate racism in the twenty-first contrary.