cht 6

Ricky Woodie
Ethics
Cht. 6
September 16, 2007

Blog post


In chapter 6 of PPD, the authors thesis, is that people have trouble talking about issues, because it feels too risky. He says how people focus on individualism, and that everything bad in the world is someone’s fault. An example is how women blame sexism on all men, saying how all men are bad. Then the all men feel attacked and the good men are never sexist because they do not cheat to treat women badly. He says that we learn social life, and that we learn it through family, schools, religion, and mass media. For example men treat women like objects because we see it done on TV. He also says that he always been taught that white straight men were the most important people because they were seen as important figures on television. Social systems are when people come and work together at something. He says that in these social systems, that people follow the paths of least resistance. He says that racist people claim they aren’t racist when they are to hide. People that are racist have mental problems, but the they have to learn who to hate. The author states that we can follow social paths, but we don’t have to be ruthless. The article ends with him saying people should follow the social system, but speak out against racism.

How can we “re-write” the social system to not be racist? The author makes a good point that racism is learned through family, schools, and media, but he needs to state how we can change the social system. What ways we should speak out. When he was making his monopoly argument, he should have given real life situations to compare it to when explaining how we are greedy.

In my opinion I agree with the author that people need to not be silent and act out against racism. I didn’t agree with him on the shirt example how he supports some issues when buying a expensive shirt. He said that he would pay a lot of money for name brand shirts while the workers would only receive pennies for making it. If people didn’t buy these shirts then the workers wouldn’t even have a job.