identity

Racist Comments in the Public Eye and How We Deal with Them

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There are moments when a comedian goes from funny to offensive, or an ordinary college student goes from innocent and ordinary to an ignorant offender of a racist action. These are pivotal moments, because the way the world and those involved choose to respond can make all the difference of how the racial discourse continues on. Melissa Villaseñor was recently announced as the first Latina cast member of Saturday Night Live, and will start her first season on the show …

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What’s A Patriot, Anyway?

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Growing up in Massachusetts this word, “patriot,” was thrown in my face a lot. We even have a holiday day celebrating patriots, complete with parades, reenactments, and no work or school. It wasn’t until I came to college when I asked a friend whether we got off school for Patriot’s Day that I realized, from her very confused expression, that this day is not a national holiday and many people have never even heard of it. A recent article I …

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Every. Single. Day.

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Every. Single. Time. I got a campus safety alert in college, I crossed my fingers and hoped it was not a black or brown man. I remember hearing people say to stay away from sketchy neighborhoods in Allentown, which at the time didn’t look too different from where I grew up. I heard people talk about going to White Wawa instead of Black Wawa or “Blawa.” Some people would drive out of their way to exclusively go to the former. These …

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Identity, Awareness, and Change

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Last semester, I took an introduction to anthropology course because I thought it would be interesting to learn about other cultures and societies. This class taught me many valuable concepts, but one word that stuck out to me was the word, positionality. Positionality refers to how anthropologists define their background and how their identities influence their research. I found this quite interesting, because it made me examine who I am and where I fit in the big picture of society …

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Complacence in the Classroom

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own racism. In class discussions of explicit versus implicit racism, I realized that although I am not an overt racist, I do (like many other White people in today’s society) exhibit implicitly racist tendencies. Over my education both in previous courses and this class of Contemporary Racism, I have become increasingly more aware of these tendencies and am actively making every effort to combat them. For example, a couple years ago in …

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Overcompensation Doesn’t Improve Relation(s)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately in class about the tendency that white people have to overcompensate for the racist acts of other white people. For example, when a white person hears a story about another white person acting in a racist way or making a racist comment, they often react by making a dramatic claim in order to make it clear that in NO way do they associate with the racist belief system of another white person. In the fall of 2015, many individuals …

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Institutional Racism on college campuses: I, too, am Harvard

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  http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/21-black-harvard-students-share-their-experiences-through-a The article above was introduced to me recently by one of my friends. While I was going to write about something different this week, this article captured me. Entitled “I, too, am Harvard” you see a preview of a photo project from 21 students of color who attend Harvard university. Each is holding a black dry erase board which dons a common phrase that they often hear and has in some way effected them. Thinking about what we …

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