Who Bears the White Collar?

Over the course of the weekend, I began writing about my first set of artifacts for class, and to be honest, I was a tad proud of my idea. I found it to be relatively creative and original, but unfortunately, as I was rounding third, I realized it had little correlation to the urban theme. I spent the whole time thinking, "What would be a good way to discuss race without being completely trite," that I lost focus on the central theme of the entire course! This brought me to another realization, I am an idiot. Consequently, I scrapped the idea, so let's see what's behind door number two.

Here we see some textbooks, some pencils and pens, and the last thing looks to be a notebook. You could say they belong to some of the essential tools of knowledge. A great majority of children within the US are given the chance to use these tools, but when utilized by certain minds in certain settings, it seems they're work is not up to par. In many large cities, where blacks and/or hispanics hold a high percentage of the population, schools are overwhelmed by poor test scores and high dropout rates. Statistics like these create a by-product of generalizations for the workplace. Why do we only perceive the hard-working white American, or the "math gene" bearing Asian owning white collar status? I mean, they're not from those parts, right?

My second artifact, or my material artifact, was a white-collared shirt. It seems as if I took the term to a literal sense, but I used it to symbolize the status of the white-collared worker. I chose this symbolization because of our societies ridiculous perception of the white-collared worker (which was described in the previous paragraph), or specifically his or her ethnicity.