According to Mills (2000), individuals living in contemporary society often perceive their private lives as a network of traps. As such, ordinary people feel that they cannot circumvent their everyday troubles. In some way, this kind of feeling is correct since what this category of people are aware of and what they attempt to do are restrained by the private orbits they inhabit. Contextually, their powers and visions are limited to social facets of human life such as neighborhood, family, and jobs. In other words, these people move vicariously and in the process remain spectators. Of more concern is that the more aware such people become of the threats and ambitions transcending their immediate settings, the more the feeling of entrapment intensifies. In this regard, the scholar opines that sociological imagination is the vivid awareness vis-à-vis the relationship existing between the wider society and personal experience that enables individuals to establish a grasp of both personal biography and history and how the two relate within society. In simple terms, it is the ability to have a proper understanding of how historically-conditioned forces shape personal experiences. This development is manifested in various ways across the current society. One of such ways is evident in the social phenomenon of racism targeting the black community in the United States. The goal of this paper is to explore social imagination from this perspective.
Personal Explanation
It is of little doubt that the issue of racism towards the black community in the United States stems from the conflict between the two races. This form of conflict is not a newly emerged development but traces its origin to the slavery period when members of the black race found themselves in new geographical settings as a major outcome of the transatlantic trade in response to the growing demand for goods generated by the industrial revolution that had swept across the United States.
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Despite being human beings of free will, the black community was subjected to inhumane treatment as slaves in the sugar plantations. This is besides other forms of human cruelty including poor living conditions, many hours of work without sufficient remuneration and eventual erosion of human dignity. However, advocacy from abolitionists to end slavery bore fruit at the end of the 18th century and former slaves became recognized as part of the United States demographics.
Yet the stigma of slavery persisted and the raw relations between the black and the white race continues to date, with black Americans continuously perceived as second class citizens and socio-politically and economically below the dominant white race. The end effect of this social occurrence has created a divide between black and white Americans in spite of the interventions by administrations subsequent to the slavery period to put an end to this divide. Regarding this, the American social stratification system has largely ignored the black race in most of its facets such as education, housing, and employment, with the case of the latter being more pronounced and with comparatively more grievous consequences.
Sociological Imagination
The problem of racism against the black community in the United States is explainable through social imagination. As already stated, there are historical forces that account for the prevalence of this social problem, and these forces are major contributing factors in the experiences a majority of black Americans go through in their daily lives both at a communal and personal level. It is prudent to point that the concept of black and white community within the united states context as some of the variables in the problem of racism, is a sociological construct with its own set of human behaviors and interactions that have expectations and meanings between its members (Scott, 2013). In this regard, the sociological construct surrounding the two conflicting communities is not just a mere action, but are actions pegged on shared values, expectations, meanings and beliefs between individuals.
According to recent statistics (World Atlas, 2018), 45.90% of Americans consider themselves as members of the white community, while 12.30%, regard themselves as members of the black community. While these statistics bear some truth in the ordinary sense, it should be mentioned that they rest on mere skin pigmentation as a key element in the social construct of each community and nothing more. This is despite each of these communities existing in a singular society that attempts to connect its inhabitants in a common culture with a common language, values, and norms in the interest of social cohesion.
Part of the problem of racism against the black community in the United States emanates from the social organization within the American society. As Better (2008) argues, the arrangement of the parts constituting the United States society has deliberately relegated minority communities such as the black Americans in various aspects such as status and roles. This deliberate relegation has been carried out by the social institutions expected to guide society through its young members towards the right trajectory. Yet, this has not been forthcoming as some of the American social institutions such as the family and education systems continue to accord the dominant and major white race preferential treatment at the altar of social cohesion and to the disadvantage of minority communities, with the black community often at the receiving end.
Such disparities in consideration of the treatment offered to this distinct group of Americans is fueled by the escalation in the competition for meager resources as the conflicting communities attempt to outdo each other in the quest for these resources which continue to dwindle with the surge in population given the constantly rising birth rates and other population-growth-based factors such as improvement in the quality of life. At a micro level, this has worsened the personal troubles experienced by individual black Americans, more so, if viewed from their immediate relations to members of the dominant white race considering their limited influence on the outcome and issues within the personal level. At a macro level, the conflict between white and black Americans has distinguished the cultural practices and the general outlook of each community and set them apart from each other in the languages spoken as exemplified in the preference for modified English language in the case of black Americans, their mode of dressing and religious inclinations otherwise different from that of white Americans.
In conclusion, the problem of racism experienced by black Americans is a social construct that intertwines between the personal experience of the individual and the historically-conditioned forces shaping the individual experiences stemming from the problem of slavery created by their white counterparts and the social factors such as social stratification and institutions that furthered its continuity.
References
Better, S. (2008). Institutional racism: A primer on theory and strategies for social change . Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scott, J. (2013). C. Wright Mills and the sociological imagination: Contemporary perspectives . Cheltenham: Elgar.
World Atlas. (2018, June 7). Largest ethnic groups and nationalities in the United States. Retrieved from https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/largest-ethnic-groups-and-nationalities-in-the-united-states.htm
