implicit bias

Am I the Stereotype?

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What is a stereotype? Social psychology defines a stereotype as “any thought widely adopted about specific types of individuals or certain ways of behaving intended to represent the entire group of those individuals or behaviors as a whole.” Stereotypes are generalizations made about people and the groups in which those people belong to based on their appearances and behaviors. Do you know of any stereotypes made about you? Your skin color? Your religion? Your ethnicity? Your people? Not only do …

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Stop Normalizing Color-blind Ideologies

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I have been thinking a lot about the ideas of prejudice and the denial of racism that were presented in the article ?Beyond Prejudice: Toward a Sociocultural Psychology of Racism and Oppression by Glenn Adams, Monica Biernat, Nyla R. Branscombe, and others?. W?ithin this article, they suggested models that account for the denial of racism, which they identified as being the “restriction of the range of phenomena to which the concepts of racism and oppression apply, with the corresponding sense …

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The Acts of Exclusion in Greek Life

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Greek life has been under a microscopic eye, especially this summer and fall. Sorority Instagram pages are flooded with pictures of members and captions saying, “I found my girl gang!” What about everything that’s going on in the world? The protests, the murders, the systemic racism absolutely has to be acknowledged. We have to acknowledge that Greek life as a whole is predominantly white. I think many people have a fear of joining Greek life because they look different (size, …

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I’m a Barbie girl living in a White world

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Take a moment and think back to what dolls you played with as a child. Most of you probably mentioned companies such as Barbie or American Girl. What did these dolls look like? Unfortunately, the majority of you probably said they were White, blonde, and had blue eyes. Most people think why does this matter? It is just a toy. However, it does matter. Although children are young, they are very observant. As they grow up they are absorbing and …

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White’s Anatomy

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The invisibility of whiteness has never been an issue for me until I took this class. And when I became aware of the invisibility of my race, I began to notice it explicitly in other places, specifically when it came to the media. Grey’s Anatomy is a television show that is often highly praised for its racially diverse cast of characters, and more often than not in its recent episodes, it is praised for the attention it brings to highly …

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Sisterhood’s Lasting Impacts

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One of the clearest impressions I have of Greek Life is the movie Sydney White, where every member of the sorority portrayed in the movie is thin, white, and blonde, except for Sydney White, who is, *gasp*, a brunette. And that impression has not been disproven. When I entered Greek Life at Muhlenberg, there were no black women who had joined or were already members in my chapter. There was one Latina woman, who graduated, and in the composite photos …

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Racism in Restaurants

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I have worked in the service industry doing everything from bussing to serving to bartending for years and the one thing that has followed me to every establishment I have worked in is explicit racism. In recent years more attention and media coverage has been given to the issues black people face as consumers in America. Instances such as two black men being arrested in a Starbucks or the singer SZA being followed around by a security guard while in …

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