In this week’s reading Who Gets to be Afraid in America? I found this article very interesting and quite frankly emotional. It became hard to read this piece from an academic perspective and not bring in my personal experiences and feelings about the subject matter. Being a black woman and remembering my own reaction when Ahmaud Arbery was killed in 2020 reading this article brought up feelings that I forgot that I had. But these forgotten feelings are ones that I know well, I do not think of this article as a wokeist agenda but rather a lived reality of many black Americans. Throughout my time in this course, I have learned and explored viewpoints and academic tools that might not align with my own but have still tried to understand them and see their point of view, but when looking at this article in relation to the course I am struggling to understand the connection to the intellectual class. Is the connection between the author and how they fit into the intellectual class or the subject matter that they are writing about? After reading this piece I went back to the syllabus to see where it fit into that and when I saw that the author was a professor at BU I thought that the connection could be because our two schools are very similar in style of teaching. Anyone can correct me if I am wrong or blinded by personal feelings and emotions but I did not find that this article was pushing the author’s viewpoint into an academic setting as I viewed it as an opinion piece and not something that was intended to be used as an academic tool.
When tying back to the title of the article, I think that anyone can be afraid in America based on any social identifiers but from a sociological perspective, functionalism works best here to see how functions and conversely dysfunction that are a result of racism. From a functionalist point of view, the death of Ahmaud Arbery is part of a system of modern racism that functions to allow a dominant group to hold power over another resulting in the death of the subordinate racial group.
A few questions that I have in relation to this article:
Is there a case in which people who are in a dominant group, not just related to race, truly feel afraid in America? Or is this just a feeling for ones who are in a minority?
“When white men murder men like me, they call it self-defense. And they are believed. When men like me defend ourselves against violent white men, they call us the aggressors. And they are believed.” In relation to this quote from the article, does the language that we use to describe others and stereotypical ideas of them perpetuate acts of violence?