of race and stratification

The fact that race is socially constructed does not negate the fact that systematically different patterns of outcomes are produced within a racially stratified society.

-- Michael C. Dawson

from Black Visions

This observation seems particularly germane for this white-skinned HBCU alumnus...

And, as a side note, it would seem to apply equally as well to gender as a social construct.

of race, class, and sex

Black women are a prism through which the searing rays of race, class and sex are first focused, then refracted. The creative among us transform these rays into a spectrum of brilliant colors, a rainbow which illuminates the experience of all mankind.

-- Margaret B. Wilkerson

from A Shining Thread of Hope (Hine and Thompson, 1998)

why history?

Karl Marx noted that:

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crises do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language.

which seems quite apt. I've been thinking a lot lately about distinctions between disciplines and my motivation for choosing to pursue my studies in history when my interests rum the gamut of the humanities, from anthropology to sociology.

Marx's insight seemingly encapsulates the essence of the importance of studying history, and is certainly more eloquently stated than the plain fact of the matter: history matters to us all and inevitably influences the making of tomorrow's history.

of politics and white privilege

This is a great oped piece which provides solid examples of the oft-overlooked and illunderstood phenomenon of White Privilege: This is Your Nation on White Privilege. You should read it.

Here's a highlight:

White privilege is being able to dump your first wife after she’s disfigured in a car crash so you can take up with a multi-millionaire beauty queen (who you go on to call the c-word in public) and still be thought of as a man of strong family values, while if you’re black and married for nearly twenty years to the same woman, your family is viewed as un-American and your gestures of affection for each other are called “terrorist fist bumps”

And if you aren't familiar with White Privilege in the first place, you should read Peggy McIntosh's essay, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, in which she sets out to define the phenomenon:

As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage. I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.

As a white girl who has attended an HBCU for several years, and lived in one of the most racist states in the nation for almost a decade, I've become all too aware of the privileges bestowed upon me by virtue of my pale skin, so for me this is interesting stuff.