Investigate your social biography (note that this is different than personal biography) about how you learned about race and how that relates to power and institutional discrimination. It is likely that you learned about race in a way that did not include a deeper understanding of how settler colonialism sets up and maintains a system that hampers movement. Sometimes it seems that we cannot remember how we learned about race, but after giving it some thought you will realize that at some point you were made aware. Since race is a biological fiction, a story we are told by Social Institutions (Links to an external site.), most of us had a moment (or several) when we realized that others racially separated us and that others were different from us.

After you have laid out your social biography about race and made the connections to how race works as a social institution hampered by institutional discrimination, provide an analysis of a current event that is an example of institutional racism that you now think of differently after learning all you have in class so far. If you feel like what you’ve learned has enhanced what you already knew, great! Find a story from the headlines that represents anything connecting race and institutional discrimination. Your job here is to be reflective on your learning (think about our KML activity and the process of how we incorporate information) and to use your research skills to find a story representative of your social learning biography.

Rely heavily on the required readings as you use a sociological perspective to compare and contrast the reported experiences of different individuals from different minority groups. Through your research, expand upon the required readings with reading you have done on your own. Be sure to include citations for this material in your list of references.

Instructions:

• Write a 3-4-page paper or about 1500 words, not including the title and reference pages, which are required.