Alexander, “The Color of Justice”

Directions for Study Questions
Answer ONE question for each of the four assigned readings below. Please answer thoroughly and insightfully. Support your responses with examples. (Upload a document in word docx or doc format). Please number your responses.
Ralph, Renegade Dreams (Introduction)
1. The introduction of Renegade Dreams begins with an ethnographic vignette that features Justin Cone (one of principal consultants) and Tony Akpan. What is the point? In addition to the physical injury due to gun violence, what other forms of injury does author Luarence Ralph identify? How, specifically, does injury “invade people’s lives” as he points out? What does Ralph learn from Justin here at later in the Introduction?
2. What are some key points Ralph makes in his discussion of dreams? How does he draw on the writings or words of Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama? How do dreams operate in Edgewood? What does Ralph mean by "renegade" dreams?
3. How do many “outsiders” (journalists, scholars, city officials, social workers) represent life in Edgewood? How do these representations differ from the was the community sees itself? How do you interpret this?
4. How does Ralph draw on Michel-Rolphe Trouillot’s concepts of “history as registered” and “history-as-lived”? What do these concepts mean? How do they relate to Ralph’s ethnography?
Alexander, “The Color of Justice”
5. Alexander begins her paper with two short vignettes on “victims” of the War on Drugs. Briefly summarize these. What is her point? What do you think?
6. How and why, in an age of “color-blindness,” has the War on Drugs been unleashed so devastatingly on relatively impoverished communities of color? Is Alexander right to argue that this is unjust? What is she getting at when she writes that the War on Drugs has produced “one of the most extraordinary systems of racialized social control the world has ever known”?
Gallagher “Colorblind Privilege”
7. What do Alexander (pp. 421-2) and Gallagher mean by “colorblindness”? How do they contextualize colorblindness historically and politically? How might colorblindness conceal underlying structural racism and inequality? What does Gallagher mean by colorblind “style,” and what is his point? What do you think?
8. What does Gallagher mean by “colorblind ideology”? What are its key features? What is “ideology” anyway and how does it operate? How, according to Gallagher, does colorblindness serve to mask white privilege? What is white privilege?
9. How do whites and African Americans tend to differ in their perceptions of racial inequality in America? How do you feel about this? What is to be done?
Stack, from All Our Kin
10. Talk about Stack’s field methods. How did she gain access and build access to this impoverished Midwestern Black community in “The Flats”? How does she build rapport and trust with Ruby Banks? How does Ruby treat her? Identify some of the daily activities Stack participated in. What insights do these provide into the practice of everyday life in The Flats?
11. Discuss the social and economic roles played by “swapping” in The Flats:
a. How does it entail “obligation”?
b. How does it constitute social relations, including kin networks?
c. What is its economic role?
d. How is “swapping” both necessary and positive, on the one hand, and competitive, aggressive, and manipulative, on the other?
What is your overall impression of social life in The Flats?