How do you spot someone that is deviant? You pick a sample and watch them. If you want to know who they think is deviant too, you listen. I listened and watched my parents this past week to see who they thought was deviant. My parents are very overt of who they think is deviant. My parents make it very obvious who is normal and who is deviant. The deviant people are African Americans. You can tell by the way they talk about African Americans compared to whites.
My father doesn’t gain anything but self confidence or self esteem by considering African Americans deviance. It makes him feel better each time he talks about African Americans, or how he says “those blacks.” The only reason why “these people” (African Americans) are considered deviant to my father is because that is how he grew up. He has been prejudice towards this population for as long as I can remember. My father is in his 50’s and the only explanation that I can think of is his parents grew up in the generation where African Americans were looked at differently than whites more than they are now, so I was taught to keep that going. I never heard any definition or any other explanation of why he thinks African Americans are deviant. You can either hear a black person joke from him or something about our President, Obama, daily. It’s not even worth bringing up anything that deals with those two populations because he will go on and on about how they are deviant or how he thinks they are deviant. The consequence of African Americans being deviant is punishment. It’s like we all hear in the media, this African American did this, and that one did that. They are getting so many years in prison. My parents don’t police or monitor African Americans; it’s how they were raised. They don’t go looking for them to monitor their good or bad behavior; it’s just something they may run across. If you are talking about a crime, the first thing from my father is “was he black?”
My parents, but mostly my father follows a path of least resistance. Like it is discussed in “Privilege, Power, Difference, and US” whether he intends to or not, he follows this path of least resistance, and that is how white, male dominance will continue even if it is not meant the way it is portrayed, to gain there power. If they would follow the path of resistance then maybe others would move up in the chain of command, African Americans or maybe females. This reminds me of those two videos that we watched this week of the African American boys vandalizing and then white boys vandalizing the same thing. How would you react? The way it was portrayed in the videos or the right way. My parents would have reacted the way the people did in the videos because he considers the African American population deviant.
In conclusion, my father’s master status is he is a white heterosexual male that is able bodied and he has followed the path of least resistance. African Americans are deviant to him. He doesn’t gain anything from believing that African Americans are deviant, he doesn’t police or monitor them. He doesn’t go looking for African Americans; it’s more of just if something comes up. My father is privileged and he uses it.
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