2ness, Social Structure, Personal Responsibility

Let Senator Obama speak in his own words about this distinction. He did a good job combining the two points of view. This is related to "2-ness", from a speech to the NAACP this Monday: CLICK TO Yahoo story As many pointed out in papers, 2ness can "set in" in many contexts, not just black and white.

• What happens when a leader speaks of personal responsibility instead of structural matters?
• What happens when a leader speaks of personal responsibility for just one race or one sex?

The repercussions of slavery: whites systematically broke down slave families; it was an achievement of a black man NOT to work so hard; slavery was followed by decades of violence and prejudice; it has only been a bit over 1 generation since the Civil Rights Act, which was the next attempt to stop the structure of slavery. History indeed left the AfAmer community with fewer fathers & proportionately more children and more strong women alone - and left all politicians and sociologists in a quandry about how to approach the issue. And now immigration surrounds it with more complexities as racism comes in varieties and sometimes creates what we in soc414 could call ... 3-ness~!.

Reread DuBois beautiful writing PP. 154-156 in text about how a father who faced discrimination is to teach a child. Though progress has been made in the 3 generations since Dubois wrote, the question remains: if life is "unfair" how does a father teach fairness? How do we find a path thru structure + motivation and thru all colors?

Take the problem of rape and femicide: Is it less complex? It seems more obvious and "ok" to target either men or women, but that personal responsibility route sometimes goes like this for the girls, cover up and don't be 'provocative;' for strong-arm boys, don't use brute strength to overcome: muscles give you not a cultural right. What if we taught our children - boys and girls - to honor and respect the sacred temple of the body? When we focus on a sex or a race - how do we avoid singling it out for even more "isolation?" you get the drift .... comments?