Howard Winant's Racism: From Domination To Hegemony?

Racism is a problem that most people cannot see in today’s society. It hides itself in our everyday lives and we just tend to ignore it. It is well hidden because over the years it has changed its form from what we are used to into something that we just see as life screwing us over. In Howard Winant’s “Racism: From Domination to Hegemony,” he talks about how racism has changed from being about how one race dominates another to racial hegemony. He defines racial hegemony as “the routinized outcome of practices that create or reproduce hierarchical social structures based on essentialized racial categories” (Winant 129). Winant’s points that he declares in his essay is also seen in current events, such as the police brutality and the goals

Our brain uses stereotypes as a method to characterize certain groups so that we can be prepared for any surprises, but it is also our job to realize where these stereotypes end and where reality begins. Police brutality is caused when officers of the law perceive a threat where there isn’t one. They perceive these threats based upon preconceived notions of black Americans. Judith Butler points out that the reason Black Lives Matter exists is because they have to state the obvious that the lives of black people matter. In her interview in the Opinionator, Butler says “If black lives do not matter, then they are not really regarded as lives, since a life is supposed to matter. So what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all.” The reason the Black Lives Matter activist group are so enraged is that they have to state an obvious fact which is that no one life should be regarded higher than another by the merit of their skin color. Police officers perceive black people as a threat because they are accustomed to black committing crimes. Their brain uses the stereotype of black people committing crimes and puts that into every situation that a black person is involved with, which causes officers of the law to attack unharmed black people