Black Atlas: The Weight of White Judgement
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Despite living in a climate that touts that racism has been eliminated, true racial equality is still absent in the modern United States. My thesis research is a study of how American society identifies, categorizes, and reinforces stereotypes onto Black men, and how those expectations shape the personal identities that these men create. Grounded in a series of in-depth interviews with ten collegiate Black men, my research examines the hyper-focus that American society places on Black men, as well as the impact this fixation has on the way these men perceive both themselves and the world around them. I argue that my findings support the existence of a new sociological concept I am calling “Black Atlas” theory. Black Atlas theory stipulates that the lived experience of an American black man is tied inherently to defying the expectations of white society—of disproving stereotypes, learning specific, self-protective capital, and all the while, bearing the weight of the Black racial monolith on his shoulders. Black Atlas theory further argues that the lived experience of a Black American man means that he is constantly viewed as an example before he is viewed as an individual; chained simultaneously to defying white expectation and representing the entirety of the Black community.