Brief 9/12

Power relations are imbedded in society and never clearly seen. They are like ghosts sliding through social dogmas. How we define and perceive power differs. Yet in contemporary American world, it is clear that power rests on the history. Having such an unbearable past in a complicated world hinders to look out for a new future.

The writer suggests that societies are created by what she calls “complex personhood”. And complex personhood is created by memories and experiences of communities. In the writer’s words, they are “haunted” by the dominant factors. In America, today and the future is build upon the absences of past. Absence of humanity, absence of social empathy and even the absence of being in a relational state. Thus, people are tend to be put in two different categories: the ones who held the power, and the ones who has not had it yet. In short, otherness is embedded in the American society.

Being entitled to otherness, people constantly “conceptualizing” and giving different names to racial discrimination. In each shadow described in the article, there is the identity of an any minority people. It, again like last class’ reading, identifies each people of minority groups with a common fear and sentiment.

The writer seeks to reveal the unspoken of society by identifying social struggles as «ghost”. Ghosts are so close to be nothingness, yet even their idea is enough to shiver the spines. It is close to the reality we are experiencing yet it is hard to identify. In a complicated life itself, could not naming those fragile stigmas drags back the society even more.

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