Web log 4

Weblog 4

The term social justice has been around for a very long time and has been defined many different ways by many different people, however, in America during the 19^th century; it seems that social justice was not even considered during the creation of most social reforms, such is discussed in “Where race lives” website. The imbalance of social justice starts as early as 1935 with the creation of social security which guaranteed an income for workers after retirement, however, this policy excluded agricultural workers and domestic servants. Agricultural workers and domestic servants were predominantly jobs maintained by minorities and thus, many nonwhite people were excluded from this plan. Other examples include the Wagner act which allowed workers to unionize, but it allowed for unions to exclude nonwhites and did not allow minorities to challenge this law, because of this, many people of color were excluded from better paying jobs and many of the workers benefits, this law would be modified to not allow all unions over 20 years later. It seems that many other government reforms over the years would be created to benefit whites and exclude people of non-color, and the reforms made help minorities were not well enforced until much later. There is then the tale of two families, which depicts the difference between a black male and a white male from two vastly different back grounds growing up living two different lives. Throughout the story, the white male lives a life where the financial opportunities were prominent and he didn’t have to worry about financial issues, whereas the black male lived having very few job opportunities, making much less money and had to worry about the access to money his entire life. The last issue the website discusses is how a good neighborhood gets destroyed; basically starts with the movement of rich white people move out of a neighborhood when minorities begin to move in because they view the minorities a sign of financial distress in a neighborhood. The simple fact that the majority views minorities as a sign financial decline in a neighborhood is a sign of social injustice within itself, and the movement of the richer white people out of a neighborhood decreases the amount of money in a neighborhood which then leads to the increase of taxes to maintain the neighborhood, which then leads to the downfall of the neighborhood when the lower income people cannot pay the taxes. In the end the website shows us how the government has worked against minorities and how this has caused the differences in today’s society because of it; it has shown that social injustice has caused a vast imbalance in income between the minority and the majority. If only social justice had’ve been maintained over the years, maybe we would live in a more equal society.