This week’s topic of discussion in lecture was racialization. I am an individual who is half
African American and my whole life I have been able to easily distinguish racialized events and
have even experienced it myself many times. The town I am from (back in the day) was
dominated by white individuals and families so, my siblings and I were identifiable without even
trying. When learning about racialization within course contents and readings, it is not anything
new that I am reading or learning. It just seems like everything is either getting repeated or
getting worse. For example, in this week’s reading by Reese et al (2018), she speaks about food
access between both low-income and high-class neighbourhoods. They mention how in terms of
access to food, high-income neighbourhoods do not face any struggles when needing food in
comparison to low-income neighbourhoods who struggle with easy or any access to grocery
stores or fresh foods when needed. Something like this was not a shock to me because I am
aware that this is still a problem in our society today. It feels as though those who are of lower
income are not being cared for by anyone, especially our government who do not see any
problem with this. Since those of low-income need to travel farther to get food, they have to take
more time out of their day, drive or walk a further distance or spend money on transit just to be
able to provide for themselves and their families. In a way, it indirectly shows that those of
higher class are cared for and thought about first and those of lower income needs are thought
about less or not at all. This ties into racialization because those who come from lo-income
neighbourhoods are usually those from racialized communities, whereas those in high-income
communities are usually of Western culture.
Questions:
1.
How do you think racialization is the same and/or different today compared to the
previous century?
2.
In what ways do you think we can fix problems like access to food and essential
resources in order for those from racialized communities to get the same opportunities as
those from high-income neighbourhoods?
Racialization was the topic for this week in the course. This was a very easy concept for me to
follow along with because I have seen and experiences racialization my whole life. I am half
African American and half Dutch so, when walking around, so at a first glance it is easy to see
that I am not Caucasian. In most classes that I have taken, it speaks about racialization and each
time, it feels like I am hearing the same things and not really learning anything new and if it was
something that I did not know of, then it would not be a surprise to me just like the reading from
this week. The reading by Reese et al (2018) delves into the advantages and disadvantages that
low-income and high-income communities face when compared to one another. One specific
aspect they focused on in the article was access to food such as grocery stores, supermarkets, and
fresh food. Already knowing, the article just solidified my knowledge that those from higher-
income neighbourhoods have easier access to such places mentioned previously, whereas those
from low-income neighbourhoods continuously face a disadvantage of getting any or easy access
to such food places. It can be seen that these supermarkets and access to healthy and fresh
produce are located in the high-income areas because they know that they will make a lot of
money whereas if it was located in a low-income neighbourhood, they would not make as much.
