- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
This week I focused on reading and unpacking the concepts presented in Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s book, Racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America. Although I have not completely finished it, his book has presented a number of important ideas that I intend to incorporate into my paper. Firstly, he has a lot of information on “the new racism” practices that still exist today, something that will be useful to integrate into my paper to demonstrate how racist practices still infiltrate American society even if colorblindness mutes its significance and widespread nature. He includes a number of interesting examples of the contemporary structure of this new racial order. The central frames of color-blind racism that he presents in chapter 3 were quite interesting and relevant for my paper. I think all of the frames he presents (abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism) are present in the data I have uncovered these past few weeks. Furthermore, the examples, phrases, and racial stories he puts forward regarding how whites talk about minorities without sounding racist all resonate with my findings. His chapters on how white racial progressives and blacks are influenced by colorblindness are important because part of my findings aim to highlight how the prevalence of this ideology even affects how the most progressive and ‘woke’ white millennials and people of color conceptualize race. I aim to finish and continue marinating on Bonilla-Silva’s ideas because I think his argument validates the argument I am advancing in this paper and I intend to use his theoretical framework in my project.
I also started thinking about how I want to present my findings for my class presentation next week. Although I have not fully figured out how it will look like, I have started crafting the PowerPoint presentation and combing through the most important data and research articles to incorporate into my presentation. I hope that the creation of this presentation will help refine my thoughts on how I want to organize this paper and what pieces of information best strengthen my argument. I likely will set up a meeting later this week to discuss my presentation.
In the process of completing Bonilla-Silva’s book and crafting my in-class presentation for my final project, I may come to realization that I need to supplement some research or focus my efforts on another aspect of my project. At the moment I do not know exactly what the next steps for my paper are, but I assume that creating this PowerPoint and finishing this book will help inform my future steps. My thought now is that after finishing Racism without racists, I may want to turn to other books and articles to supplement my understanding of colorblindness and millennials, particularly White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race by Matthew Hughey. I also intend to begin working on the annotated bibliography soon since that deadline is rapidly approaching.