Crook County weaves a narrative familiar to those who follow the news: something is deeply wrong with the criminal justice system. In essence, the book explores how the criminal justice system strips black and brown people of their humanity and aims to reclassify them as nameless caricatures on which white people can place their fear. Our discussion centered around the last three chapters. These chapters detailed the way defense attorneys, public and private, prosecutors, and judges support a racist criminal justice system. It examined how a racialized form of justice forces defense attorneys to employ racist logic to defend their clients and how those defense attorneys perpetuate the same logic with their clients. It analyses how criminal defense becomes a zero-sum game where the prioritization of one client’s freedom means the loss of another’s freedom. 

To frame the conversation, Kennedi and I showed a video that details how mass incarceration has affected black and brown communities. The video talked about the scale of mass incarceration, and how it has generational effects. Through our presentation, we aimed to have a conversation about the impact of the information revealed in the book on our society and institutions. The video touched on the legacy of slavery in America and how it relates to mass incarceration. We were then able to investigate the ways that the criminal justice system act perpetuates the legacy of slavery and how both systems link through the denial of freedom. I think we could have expanded on the links between slavery and mass incarceration at the beginning of our presentation. I also think that we could expand on the experience of prison, as it would have helped to craft a thorough picture of the impact that racialized criminal justice has on the defendants and their community. This information would work against the image that mass incarceration tries to create for the black and brown people it consumes. 

Through our discussion, we explored the themes of the chapters and their connections to our readings throughout the semester such as the Inheritance of the Ghetto, the White Space, and No Place on the Corner. The story of Crook County exemplified many of the themes that we have talked about throughout the course. It touched on our conversations about colorblind racism and white fragility, particularly in the ways that attorneys and judges separated themselves from the impacts of their actions. We talked about how there were levels of generational inheritance to incarceration that could connect to the inheritance of economic inequality. At the end of our presentation, we explored how the criminal justice system works with the police force to create white spaces in black and brown communities.  

I think the discussion went well; however, there were moments when conversation felt forced or stilted. The exposition we gave before some of the questions could have caused this tension. If we asked the questions and gave the class time to answer before explaining our thought process, the class may have responded more. I also think we could have brought forth news stories that related to the chapters. This could have created a more interactive discussion.

The conversation raised several interesting questions, and I find myself wondering whether intergeneration poverty and the racialized criminal justice system have compounding effects. Further, does the racialized criminal justice system act as a mechanism that supports intergenerational poverty? How does the criminal justice system act as another mechanism to create white spaces within black and brown communities? 

Reading through Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia, one can clearly see the thoughts and ideas that the author is trying to provoke out of the reader. The author brings up a lot of questions as to what different words mean in the context of race and its current state. Such questions include the mentioning of what a minority is and who applies to that grouping, or what it means to be a model minority and why it is not necessarily a good thing. I think that the author is trying to provoke the reader into thinking more deeply about the terminology used in racial groupings and further applies it to the identity of Asians. Looking back at our presentation, I think this idea helped frame a lot of what we talked about and why the Asian American experience is negated through the language we use going into these conversations. 

Looking at our presentation, I would say we framed the conversation very well and were able to contextualize the geography of the area as well as give more insights as to how racial compositions change because I live in the general area of where the book takes place. This helped further explain the racial dynamics of the Bay Area and how they apply to Mission San Jose High School. Defining what a minority is with the class helped start the conversation on how it is defined among various groups. This further opened the discussion to the application of the book’s contents. We were then able to talk about the idea of a model minority and the implications of being a model minority. We found that taking on the model minority status takes away from the experience of the group taking it on as well as makes life harder for those groups who are not in the model minority group. An interesting point brought up in class was on who gets to decide the status of these groups. It was generally agreed upon that white people are the ones who get to make these classifications. Since they are the ones in a position of power, they can decide who is in what group and if it will be racialized such as with religion. 

We then examined a lot of the media portrayal of Asians and how they are constantly set up as being a model minority and nearing in on being white. Looking at various article titles, it becomes clear that major publishers also recognize how Asians are ‘becoming white’ in America. This idea also takes away from the experiences Asians have had in the US because they had to work hard to get to where they currently are. Them being a model minority also keeps other groups in a negative light because if Asians are the model minority, then it assumes that other groups such as African Americans and Hispanics are just not a ‘good’ minority. 

We then looked at schooling systems and their connection with Asian Americans because of the differences in prioritization between Asians and white people. Asians tend to prioritize more STEM fields in their studies, whereas white people want a more ‘well-rounded’ and ‘balanced’ education. As seen with Mission San Jose, this difference in where people want to focus their academics causes a different type of white flight where the white people of the area leave because of the rigor of the work in the primarily Asian schools. This connection was interesting because of the high amount of white people leaving and using the rigor as another way to move out. This brings up the question of when it is valid for white people to leave an area without it being considered white flight. Next, I enjoyed connecting what we read with the statistics of Bowdoin’s racial makeup and how people may think the future of Bowdoin will look like. 

After class, I was mostly left thinking about what it means to be a model minority and what if some other race was considered the model minority. I was wondering if we would see a difference in the way races see themselves if some other race such as Hispanics were the model minority. Would we see a change in the dynamic of the standard people hold themselves to? I was also left to think about the implications of the white flight in Fremont considering it is an area so close to me. Would some issue like the rigor of schools also bring up other issues of self-segregation among neighborhoods? Although the focus of the book was mostly on schools, it brings up many interesting questions on separate issues. 

The assigned readings from Patrick Sharkey’s piece “Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality” are very telling in the names of the chapters on their own: “The Inheritance of the Ghetto,” “Neighborhoods and the Transmission of Racial Inequality,” and “The Cross-Generational Legacy of Urban Disadvantage.” The week of these readings we examined exactly what these title touch on. Putting it in a broader sense, we talked about the intergenerational transmission of poverty among African Americans. We also examined the difficulty people of color have in trying to hold on to their economic upward mobility throughout generations, whereas white people can hold on to it, and if they happen to go down, it is usually only for one generation. 

Further going into our presentation, I thought it was interesting to see what came to people’s minds when we started with a word association activity on a few images we searched with terms such as “white ghetto,” “black ghetto,” and “family in suburbs.” Although Ayana and I thought that people may not really share what came to mind when they saw the images, I thought the activity went well and people were contributing to the conversation. Something that did surprise me about that activity was where the focus lay for many students. For example, for the picture of a “black ghetto,” there was a lot of debate on what city the picture was from. Next, we talked about the portrayal of black people in the ghetto because Sharkey mentions the association of welfare, incarceration, killing, and other ‘ghetto’ things with black people because of the media. We talked about the difference in between blacks and whites and how white people usually get the upper hand in their cases. 

Because we had technical difficulties, we did not get to show everything we would have liked to and in the order we wanted to, but we were able to get a video playing that touched on redlining and we connected it to the week’s readings. Redlining only contributes and perpetuates a lot of the troubles African Americans have in keeping their upward mobility because the practice would mark neighborhoods as unsafe to give someone a loan there, and the people in the redlined areas were typically African American. Although we were not able to show some of the statistics on the perception of the upper, middle, and lower classes, I think we were able to effectively communicate the difficulty of upward mobility for many African American people and how economic status is only transmitted across generations when it has to do with staying in poverty. We also found connections between the current readings and past ones such as “The Iconic Ghetto” and “Golden Valley.” Having all these connections showed us the interconnectedness of different ideas and how they all can communicate a similar idea or apply to each other. The connections to the past pieces also brought up important questions on the perception of poverty and how it would connect to an iconic ghetto person or an impoverished white person. 

Leaving the discussion, I started to ponder about some of the things we presented and that people say and one of the first questions that came to mind had to do with the intergenerational effects of poverty: if it is so difficult to stay up when you improve your way of living, how will that apply to many of my friends and myself back home? It also made me think about how this cycle can be broken and if it is too soon to tell if this will be an elongated trend for the future. Another question that was raised during discussion was about who’s responsibility it is to integrate white people and people of color. I think it is somewhat paradoxical because if white people must take charge, it brings up future issues of gentrification and such. If people of color must take charge, it brings greater issues of being uncomfortable and having to fix the issues that white people first made.

          I believe that the lesson I did with Saul on the Inheritance of the Ghetto went well. In preparation for the lesson the class was assigned to read chapters 2,4 and 5 in Patrick Sharkey’s “Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Inequality.”The readings were extremely interesting because they focused on different aspects that keep white people in comparison to black people in a certain urban location, and how these urban areas evolved into the current idea of the “ghetto”. 

          We tried to incorporate the history and evolution of the term “ghetto” in the beginning of the presentation because we thought that is especially important in how/why Americans tend to view “ghetto” in correlation to black people. However, we only referenced two specific eras in which this term evolved that was indicated in the reading: Post WWII and Post Civil Rights era. In this presentation, we also wanted to reflect on how media plays a prominent role in how others perceive a “ghetto”. Therefore, we looked up “Ghetto Neighborhood” on google and put the picture that comes up on our first slide, which displays a black man on the side of a dirty street with seemingly destroyed roads. In relation to how media influences our thoughts on this topic, we decided to try to incorporate a word association activity. Three images conveyed on the slide symbolized specific words associated with the image when one would look it up on google. We wanted to get the honest opinion of what initially came into everyone’s mind when they saw these images. Saul and I predicted that it may be difficult to get people to actually say what they were thinking. We did get a lot of responses; however, they were not responses that pointed out the different races and how that connects to the neighborhood illustrated. For instance, with the picture with the two black men, people expressed that they thought the men were in a city and they actually debated which city they were located in, instead of referencing that the image signifies a poor, dirty, ghetto, black populated neighborhood in the perspectives of many Americans and possibly themselves. I think maybe if we phrased the task differently, asking them how the image specifically relates to racist perceptions in America, we would have received different responses. 

          We portrayed how black burglars versus white burglars are portrayed in the media. Everyone seemed to agree that they see how black criminals are illustrated in a negative way than white burglars. We had some technical difficulties in the classroom, so we transitioned to discuss specific questions in small groups. I believe that having them talk in small groups was beneficial because they had time to develop thoughtful answers about one specific question, instead of creating surface-level answers to multiple questions. Everyone was engaged in their group and five minutes seemed to be enough to discuss the question. They had the chance to share their thoughts with the class. The question about whose responsibility it is to change the “ghetto” system led to differing opinions on whether it was white people or black people’s responsibility. I wish we had more time to dive further into their responses to this question and to all of the questions. 

          Saul and I thought it was important to relate Sharkey’s work to some of the other readings we read in the past. We had information about how the inheritance of the ghetto relates to Anderson’s “The Iconic Ghetto” because of how the ghetto is similarly portrayed and how it resembles places that black people predominantly live. We also relate our topic to the Sherman’s “Those who work, those who don’t: Poverty, Morality and Family in Rural America” with a few questions about white privilege and how that privilege may even connect to their finances because of the generational effects portrayed in Sharkey’s work. The connections sparked a good, but short, discussion related to these readings. 

          Due to the technology difficulties and the amount we wanted to share information about the topic, we did not finish everything we wanted to share. We had an activity about statistics regarding upper, middle, lower classes for which the class would have to guess what percentage of Americans are in each category and the difference in the amount of black and white people in the categories. We were going to present the actual statistics after the class guessed, with the help of Professor Greene’s slides. Statistics about economic status are crucial in understanding the inheritance of the ghetto because it conveys how race influences wealth in America, which can lead to interpretations of why people of color are more inclined to stay in impoverished areas. Statistics also relate to the characteristics – like health, education, relationships in community – discussed in Sharkey’s book, that exemplify why black people stay in areas described as the “ghetto” areas over multiple generations. Another aspect of this reading that I found interesting was that it was directly related to only white and black people. I want to learn more about how the “ghetto” affects other races. I enjoyed the process of creating the lessons, formulating ideas/questions to discuss, and leading the class in those discussions. I think the discussions went well and the class participated greatly.

When exploring the topic of racism in relation to education, I thought it would be most appropriate to evaluate racism not only in higher education, but in K-12 education as well. Although class discussion focused mainly on Pamela Zabala’s thesis and consequently on racism at Bowdoin specifically, I think greater attention needs to be devoted to racism in K-12 education in the future. As first-years, we are embroiled within the “Bowdoin Bubble”; consequently, it can be difficult to expand not only our personal focus but also our intellectual focus beyond the walls of the college. Of course, the emphasis on Zabala’s thesis in class-wide discussion allows us to think ahead about the final research paper and the “Racism at Bowdoin” project. However, rounding out our knowledge about racism in K-12 education provides valuable context for its continuation in higher education.

A topic that piqued my interest during the discussion was the idea that first-year orientation programming is not proactive. Rather, programming like “More than Meets the Eye” is a reaction (perhaps even a punishment) to the cycle of campus-wide bias incidents that occur every three-and-a-half years. By drawing a veil over the specific events that led to the adoption of diversity programming, Bowdoin thus perpetuates the bias incident cycle. I agree with the notion that Bowdoin adopted this programming specifically to benefit white students with minimal exposure to diversity. The programming thus fails to create a welcoming community for students of color. In fact, some of my peers outside of class expressed that the “More than Meets the Eye: Part Two” programming felt tokenistic and aimed towards enlightening white students. Overall, we talked about what “meaningful structural change” looks like when creating a more inclusive culture on campus and brought up the idea of discussions facilitated by proctors and RAs in lieu of orientation programming. I’m a little hesitant about this proposition; I fear that it may not be effective and will feel more forced than organic.

Recently, our seminar has been discussing economic opportunity and racism. Analyzing housing segregation in relation to racism in education adds greater dimension and layering to the systemic barriers people of color face when attempting to access equitable education; it would have been nice to highlight this interplay. In my Education class, we discussed in greater depth the effects of redlining and housing segregation on fostering inequitable educational environments for students of color. I wish we could have expanded more on the relationship between segregation and school funding, as property taxes play a significant role in the funding and, thus, the quality of public schools.

Throughout the thesis, Zabala highlights the complicity of athletic teams in creating a hostile environment for students of color—whether considering the minstrel shows put on in the early 20^th century by the baseball and track team, or more recent social events like Cracksgiving, the Tequila party, and the Gangster party that took place only a few years ago. Moving forward, I’m curious to explore the role athletics and parties, as well as other entities, play in perpetuating Bowdoin’s status as a “white space” for the final project.

Talking about racism in education made me consider how societal ideas of racism persist over time. Racism in education causes the prevalence of institutional and societal racism in America. While Zabala’s thesis regarding racism at Bowdoin specifically addresses racism at institutions of higher education, racism creates more foundational biases in elementary and secondary schools across America.

While researching ideas for topics of discussions as a facilitator, I learned about the ways in which a teacher’s expectations can affect a student’s performance. I think this topic would have been interesting to discuss in more detail with the class. In one study, researchers gave children an intelligence test at the beginning of the school year. After receiving the results, the researchers told teachers that some children were more apt to achieve than others. However, they had arbitrarily picked the students who they reported to the teachers as “high-achieving.” At the end of the year, the students who were randomly picked as “high achievers” actually did show higher levels of achievement than other children in the class. Clearly, teacher expectations influence student performance. This discovery has severe implications in terms of race. Society upholds many stereotypes about people of color which can influence a teacher’s impressions and expectations of a student. If a teacher subconsciously does not believe a student will achieve, it is more than likely that the student will not reach his or her full potential. I wonder how such biases could be addressed and eradicated in schools. Is it possible for teachers to believe in all students’ potential equally? Is that even a reasonable or logical solution? If these biases stem from much foundational racial stereotypes in society, how can teachers separate their expectations from the stereotypes of people of color so that students have equal opportunities to thrive?

Racism in primary and secondary school greatly influences the institutional racism of higher education. In class discussions last week, students brought up the idea that racism in lower levels of education not only influences college students’ ideas about race but also the types of students that attend these institutions. For example, students of color who experience racism in early education may feel more inclined to stop their education after high school and teacher expectations or biases can greatly impact a students’ performance in school; if a student of color does not feel supported during his/her secondary education, he or she may not be accepted to more prestigious college due to the lack of competitiveness of their application. Because racism in colleges and universities have such a strong foundation in lower levels of education, how should we go about changing the racial dynamic of college campuses? In her thesis, Zabala advocates for “meaningful, structural change” rather than surface level changes on college campuses. But do the structural changes have to happen earlier, in lower levels of education? Is it the responsibility of colleges to try to undo the effects of racism in lower levels of education? How would they go about doing that?

The class also had an interesting discussion about Bowdoin’s orientation process regarding race. We discussed that while Bowdoin hosted programs about the importance of racial inclusion and diversity, no one ever mentioned incidents such as Cracksgiving, the Tequila Party, or the Gangster Party that Zabala discusses in her thesis. I am interested in the ways that the Bowdoin orientation process could improve because I think learning from Bowdoin’s history could help many students. I do not think it would be a good idea to immediately bring up such incidents as the first presentation because people may not be in the right mindset at that point; there is an overwhelming amount of information we receive during the orientation in the first few days. However, I do think that educating people about these kinds of incidents would benefit the students. Maybe the proctors or RAs could talk to the students about these events because they already address partying and drinking, so it would make sense for them to talk about crossing the line for party themes and the importance of talking about racial instances that happened at Bowdoin. In this way, students could learn about Bowdoin’s racial history in a smaller group so it is less overwhelming than in an auditorium with the whole class, and they would have the opportunity to ask questions in smaller groups. Then, students will have a better understanding of Bowdoin’s racial history.