cases of discriminatory practices within organizations that privilege employees on the basis of race or gender.

Paper instructions

There are countless cases of discriminatory practices within organizations that privilege employees on the basis of race or gender.

Research such a case and present some of the pertinent details, then on the basis on our weekly readings and your research, describe how you’d attempt to rewrite the organization’s rules in order to emphasize the need for diversity and fairness.

Belowe is random material learned this week in class:

Having explored the historical underpinnings of racial/ethnic difference, the power of gender and sexuality, as well as the depth and breadth of inequality in the U.S., we must turn our attention to the ways these social constructs manifest themselves in our day-to-day interactions. Doing so can give us more than just a bird’s eye view of matters of diversity, but a personal one as well.

Studies of interaction across various social settings can let us begin to re-imagine social interaction in a way that is inclusive and respectful of difference, and can be the impetus for creating new diversity initiatives.

Week 3 Learning Outcomes- Difference and Inequality in (Inter)Action

Upon successful conclusion of this week, students will be able to:

Define the concept of microaggressions.

Analyze the influence of race, ethnicity, class, gender, etc. on our value judgments;

Examine how our perceptions of race/ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, etc. manifest in our daily lives.

Week 3 – Sociology is a Martial Art!: The Fiction of the Welfare Queen
An article from Slate magazine helps shed light on how the stigma associated with welfare became part of American culture. The article begins:
“In October 1976, Reagan—who had lost that year’s GOP nomination to Gerald Ford—devoted one of his regular radio commentaries to updating the story of the “welfare queen, as she’s now called.” (While I haven’t found any examples of him saying “welfare queen” on the stump in 1976, he did use the term in this radio address.) According to Reagan, it had now been revealed that this woman (he still didn’t identify her by name) had operated in 14 states using 127 names, claimed to be the mother of 14 children, was using 50 addresses “in Chicago alone,” and had posed as an open heart surgeon. She also had “three new cars, a full-length mink coat, and her take is estimated at a million dollars.”” The Slate article continues:”Ronald Reagan regularly dusted off the welfare queen’s lurid misadventures, arguing that rampant fraud demanded decisive government action. In pushing for welfare reform as president in 1981, he told members of Congress that “in addition to collecting welfare under 123 different names, she also had 55 Social Security cards,” and that “there’s much more of [this type of fraud] than anyone realizes.”

The story in Slate details the crimes of a woman (of mixed race) named Linda Taylor, who was a criminal accused of many fraud-based crimes, as well as violent criminal acts. Though she was mixed race, Reagan often related this story in a way that implied she was black, and much of the subsequent anti-welfare discourse characterizes welfare as being mostly about the state of black Americans.

Does the rhetoric of the welfare queen impact peoples’ perception or race, class and gender? The answer seems to be yes, at least according to Social Psychologist Franklin Gilliam, who developed an experiment to test this question. Gilliam developed a several iterations of a false news story, which he and his colleagues filmed, in which the story of a woman on welfare (named Rhonda) was shown. Following the story was a survey on attitudes towards welfare. In different iterations of the false news story, the welfare recipient was shown as a white or black woman, or not shown at all as a control. All other elements including the woman’s style of clothing were kept identical, as you can see in the pictures below:

Gilliam’s results suggest that the race of the woman receiving welfare in the news story had a significant influence on the responses participants gave in the survey that followed:

When white subjects were asked to recall what they had seen in the newscasts, nearly 80 percent of them accurately recalled the race of the African-American Rhonda.

On the other hand, less than 50 percent accurately recalled seeing the white Rhonda.

Seeing a woman (as opposed to no mention of the gender of the recipient) in the news story actually decreased opposition to welfare spending.

However, exposure to a welfare queen in the news significantly increased support for negative characterizations of African-Americans by an average of 10 percent.

Exposure to the full confirmation of the ‘welfare queen’ script (i.e. black Rhonda) increased opposition to welfare spending by five percent and showed a 10 percent rise in an attribution of cause to individual failings.

Likewise, white participants who watched the welfare story with the black Rhonda were more likely to hold negative views of African-Americans than those who did not have a visual cue.

Contrary to expectations, however, exposure to the white Rhonda produced the biggest increase in anti-black sentiment. That is, watching a story with the white Rhonda increased negative depictions of blacks by 12 percent compared to the black Rhonda and by 23 percent over the story without a picture.

Thus, in a way, white women were “privileged” or valued in a way that African- American women are not.