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Nirali Patel
Professor Lambert
IAH 207
26 April 2019
Final Paper
Growing up you are told that the people you meet everyday can affect who you become
in the future and that who you choose to associate with and grow with can shape your beliefs and
values. With a majority of the United States population being white, a lot of our growing up is
impacted by white people and their mentality that they are superior to the rest of the races
because of the color of their skin. This idea is overlooked and normalized as the mentality of
white superiorship has prolonged for centuries. Frye states, “To be a member of the in-group, a
kin group, which is self-defining …Members can bend rules anytime…” (Frye 114). This idea of
being a part of an “in-group” comes with the power to create and change the rules of becoming a
part of the group in order to exclude the inferior. The rules can be expanded or condensed
whenever they want to be by the members of the in-group in order to allow for their pride to be
fulfilled. Personally, I think that much of Frye’s ideas are true when it comes to how society is
constructed by a racially supreme group, and how the rules to be included in this group are
constantly made harder for anyone that is not, in their terms, one-hundred percent white. Frye’s
main idea is portrayed in the readings
The New Jim Crow, Passing,
and
Different but the Same: A
Story of Black and White Twins.
Self-defining race is an ever-changing construct manipulated by
the white power in our society that gives them certain advantages and the power to change the
rules.
In the reading called
The New Jim Crow
, the author Michelle Alexander focuses on the
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uproar associated with the drug war. The black community is deliberately caught in situations of
drug-use, and attacked by the laws and punishments that are created by white authorities to
intentionally persecute their community. In the same situations regarding drug abuse, those of
black heritage will almost always serve their time through some form of punishment that white
people would get warnings about or let go (Alexander 98). The laws created by the white
authorities target black people and therefore give law enforcers the right to treat black people
unequally without getting reprimanded for their unfairness. Alexander then explains that our
country’s prisons and jails are associated with black people because black people are either
unfairly incarcerated or white people are dismissed from the same actions. Alexander concludes
from a research study that, “People of color are convicted of drug offenses at rates out of all
