While
participating in sociopoly during class I found myself thinking about how much
it related to Chapter 29 from our reading.
In short, this reading talked about the inequality and inherent racism toward
African Americans that can be found in both our criminal justice system and in our
correctional system. The chapter went on
to describe how this racism leads to a lifetime of oppression for the Blacks in
our country as a group. It was this
second theme of the chapter that I related the game to the most.
While
playing Sociopoly I was a member of team four in group one. This meant that my experience was supposed to
be representative of a Black male in America compared to that of individuals of
other races and genders. My team started
out with less money than every other group, and also was given the fewest “perks”
and “kick-backs” along the way.
Throughout the course of the game, the odds were constantly stacked against
us and we had to be a lot more cautious than the other teams in our group with
our gameplay choices. Though we tried to
be very conservative in spending money, we still finished the game nearly
bankrupt. This was especially hard
because our peers who were lucky enough to be White were having no problem
navigating the game.
As
I mentioned earlier, my experience in this game reminded me directly of the
reading concerning prison and inequality toward African Americans. The reading discussed how the inequality
faced by Black individuals in turn stacks the odds against them, just like the
sociopoly games rules stacked the odds against us. The game was not set up to be fair, because
the real-life experience of African American’s is not fair. I felt that the game did a good job of
representing this social fact in a creative way. It also provided an opportunity to get a
comparative example of what it is like to be members of different oppressed
groups. I personally never realized just
how drastic the contemporary inequality was until after this activity and the
subsequent lecture. At first I thought
that the game had been exaggerated, however the lecture showed just how skewed
the real numbers are.
I also had the same feeling about Black's int he Sociopoly game. They were spending most of their time in a "safety zone." While in jail, the black's didn't have to worry about losing money and competing against the privileged players in the game. My question is how do we get minorities and people who aren't privileged an equal playing field when it comes to living in America. It seems that the privilege with all their money shut down everyone else and the people who aren't privileged can barely get by providing themselves with their basic needs.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely agree with this. I mean people always say how there are so many jobs out there and people just don't want to work. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps", well I am a white male getting a college education and I am in the job market having a tough time finding a job, I can imagine being a minority in the search for jobs, it feels hopeless. I truly believe it's not what you know but rather who you know.
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