Watching Aversive Racism

Where I am from, there is not much diversity.  That was really highlighted for me while I was home this past weekend.  One of the most popular places in my hometown is a bagel shop.  Everyone goes to it and I often find myself running into old friends there both serving food and getting food.  In the summer, the local swim team has a tradition of going there after every practice (a tradition that I was part of establishing), so …

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Which one is better?

For my final blog post I decided to revisit the question that kind of stuck with me during our last class. I don’t remember the question exactly but it essentially said: isn’t bad media representation better than none because it is a start? I sort of answered it in class, but I was still struggling after. And I still, sort of, am struggling with it now. So I’m determined to find an answer by the end of this blog post. …

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Implicit Racism: A Harmful Theory?

The other day, I had a very interesting conversation with a student of color, who is a friend of mine about systems of oppression, specifically racism. For anonymity sake, we will call the student Mike. I was telling Mike about my Contemporary Racism class that I am currently taking and was surprised by his reaction to some of the concepts we are learning about. He seemed to have particular discontent with the concept of implicit bias and implicit racism. I …

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The “Bad Kid”

I went to the same public school system for first through eighth grade. My town was not that large, so the size of my grade never exceeded 70 people. Aside from a few students who moved either to our town or out of it, the kids who were in my class stayed relatively the same each year. The reason I’m writing about this is that it recently occurred to me over these eight years, there was only ever one black …

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

  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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Low Prejudice/High Prejudice

Something about our last conversation in contemporary racism was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I knew it had something to do with how we had discussed the low prejudice versus high prejudice participants in Hodson, et al (2002). We discussed how “high prejudiced” participants from a sample of college students really represents the “low prejudiced” end of the general American population. We discussed that this is due to college students generally holding more egalitarian beliefs. …

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Racism in aisle ’14

Since I have been in this class, it is amazing to me how many things I see on social media sites that relate to everything we are talking about in class.  This week I was browsing my Facebook news feed and I saw two posts, one after another, that completely shocked me.  A woman, that goes to Muhlenberg, had a post that explained a recent experience with racism. Her post stated: “So I went to my local grocery store and …

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