Introduction The study of race and ethnicity is important for us to understand our society and its members better. Over the years, there have been various scholars who have engaged in many extensive research on these topics. Their research has helped us to understand the mechanisms behind race and ethnic categories, the complexities found within them as well as the various conflicts that emerge due to many factors. This paper aims to analyse two such works titled ‘What is racial domination?’ written by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbaye.
Short summary on ‘what is racial domination?” On a whole, Desomond and Emirbaye’s work is one that is easy to read and understand. The authors start their work by unpacking the definition of
These 5 fallacies are the “Individualistic Fallacy”, “Legalistic Fallacy”, “Tokenistic Fallacy”, “Ahistorical Fallacy”, and “Fixed Fallacy.” I completely agree with the authors that these 5 fallacies contribute to growing racial tensions and conflicts in societies such as the Unites States and even Singapore. I would be focusing on the “Individualistic Fallacy” argument for this section. The individualistic fallacy is basically the idea that people racism has to do with the ‘ideas and prejudices.’. The authors go on to explain that an important element of racism under this fallacy is intentionality: the idea of whether or not you meant to act racist or not. They argue that if you can prove that intentionality leads to blaming and faulting one another, which merely conflates prejudice with racism the that is wrong. This is because it ignores for racism in institutions by only focusing on prejudiced individuals. When this happens, those who believe in the inherent differences between races but carry no prejudice will start to rationalize their way out of considering themselves a racist, blaming other people alone. This means that in the end no one tries to fix themselves. Throughout the paper, the authors make a very powerful argument that racists should recognise what they are doing and admit that they have a problem. However, this is difficult to achieve as no one would come forward and say they’re a racist. This is due to the fact that generally people are not aware that being racist does not just being prejudiced. Rather, it is something as simple as believing and being convinced that there are significant differences between races that between