Chapter three starts off with a discussion of double consciousness, I included in our course two videos. First, a video of me reading an excerpt from WBB Dubois's writing, The Souls of Black Folk. And second, a modern day interpretation of Dubois's work by Daniel Beedi, who reads a poem called Dual Duality. I hope you tune into those. Double consciousness is situational. What does this mean when a person is in a group situation with people unlike themselves, they become acutely aware of their differentness. The book provides a few examples, but I'll give you one of my own once, not long ago in one of my race and ethnicity courses, the students and I want a community award for our work organizing a Stand Against Racism event on our campus to receive this award. We were invited to the Urban League gala. When we arrived, I found myself swimming in a sea of black faces. I became acutely aware of my race and the situation. There were very few white people there in that situation. My race was palpable, but my story is a rarity. Most whites don't feel race this way. White Americans typically do not experience double consciousness. They feel part of the mainstream, and they are less likely to perceive the importance of race in other people's lives. Thinking about all of this leads us to questions about black white inequality in society, how much inequality between these two races is there? In this section, trends in black white inequality, Iceland goes over some empirical evidence that is suggestive of some black progress, but this evidence should be tempered. This is because the results are mixed and depend on which indicators we're looking at. Clearly, from the data presented, you should glean that blacks fare much better than they did, say, about 60 years ago, but so have whites in terms of racial disparities, blacks have narrowed the gap with whites when considering many important indicators such as education, poverty, residential segregation and residential attainment and life expectancy, while a couple of other gaps have remained more stubborn, including household income and wealth. But I know that when we discuss narrowing the gap, we need to pay attention to whether we are discussing the relative likelihood of an outcome by race or absolute gaps in such an outcome, likelihoods are not the same as results. Also, note that when and where progress has happened, the gaps in black white disparities have generally been very slow and uneven, which has led some to be pessimistic about the potential for change in this country. And the rest of this section of the book, Iceland, discusses some of the leading indicators of progress, like with education attainment, for example, and then follows this up with a discussion of indicators that have registered very little change or even no improvement at all, like with median household income and wealth. Chapter three is figures three through 13 for you to look at carefully reading the description of these data will help you comprehend the findings of the figures. I think reading the description in the writing is much easier than trying to discern the information from the black and white pictures in the book. I want you to do your very best to try to see the patterns that stand out. There are two important measures used to illustrate the racial disparities between blacks and whites in the data. First. Iceland uses the dissimilarity index to depict racial and ethnic residential segregation among blacks and whites over the period of 1970 to 2010. What does this measure tell us? You should know that this is the most commonly used measure of segregation, and second, this measure indicates the evenness in the distribution of groups across neighborhoods in a metropolitan area. If the metropolitan area is, for example, 10 percent black, then each neighborhood should be 10 percent black. If it were to be said that there was no segregation of blacks in that area. The index varies from zero to 100, with the higher numbers indicating more segregation. The second measure used to illustrate racial disparities between blacks and whites is the isolation index. What does this measure tell us? Isolette says that this is a measure of exposure or lack thereof to other groups. This index also ranges from zero to one hundred, with one hundred indicating the highest level of isolation and little exposure to other groups. Conversely, the lower the number, the less isolation to other groups. In this short video, I've introduced Chapter three to you and give it an example of double consciousness. I've also pointed you to different findings in Chapter three that indicate some improvement in racial disparities between blacks and whites, but also places where much improvement can be had in it by explaining the dissimilarity index and the isolation index so that you will understand how to use these measures going forward in the course. You guys don't often get to see this, but this little guy, Captain Morgan, is running around making all kinds of noise while we make videos that you might want to meet him because it would look at you like, look, he's my new little kitty.
