If someone were to describe you, what are the first things they would say? How would someone describe me: a white, blonde, young woman. See, that wasn’t too hard to describe myself with the acknowledgement of my race. Now if I can use race to describe myself, then why is it so hard to acknowledge another person’s race when describing them? I ask this question with the knowledge that for most of my life, race …
I am biased. You are, too. Let’s accept it. Bias is an ingrained part of human nature. We all have preconceived notions, stereotypes, and biases that influence our thoughts, actions, and interactions with the world around us. However, the way our brains navigate the world and interact with every social environment we’re in, we NEED to have biases and generalizations. Our brains need to have shortcuts so they can function efficiently, and we don’t have …
Here with in the United States, there is growing demand for a societal change in how we currently conceptualize and value social labels. Social labels are seen as valuable because it allows us to easily identify, associate, and group people who share a social label. However the grouping of individuals based on their label into social groups like race and gender have been the justification for the perpetuation of systematic oppression for centuries. The oppression …
Coming from a family with a military background and a brother currently serving in the United States Navy, the NFL protest of the flag has been very important to both my family and myself. Many NFL players, specifically Colin Kaepernick, decided to use their platforms to raise awareness about social issues that people of color face, such as police brutality, by not standing for the national anthem and instead taking a knee. Originally, I was …
There’s always a hair section at the supermarket: a section for hair — regular hair, normal hair, perhaps you would call it white women’s hair — and then a section dubbed “ethnic” for the other hair; it’s for the misunderstood hair, the hair that the simple “hair” section cannot provide shelf space for. The “ethnic” section is for black women’s hair. It is separate due to its other-ship. “Hair” and “Ethnic Hair” have been segregated, …
I sit down every Wednesday to watch a new show called Designated Survivor. The show revolves around the idea of the designated survivor: the person the government picks to stay home when holding the State of the Union address at the capitol. The reasoning behind the idea of having a designated survivor is in case something were to happen to all three cabinets of the government during the address, there is someone to take over …
I drive three hours almost every weekend to go home to my family, and lately I’ve been listening to podcasts to help pass the time, namely RadioLab. I came across an episode from season five simply titled “Race.” There are a lot of interesting stories featured under this topic, but one in particular has kept me thinking long after listening to it. There has been this trend circling around the internet where people reveal the …
Over the weekend, our campus emails were blasted with a message from campus safety regarding a gun, which turned out to be a BB gun disguised as a real gun near campus. My friends and I obviously all saw the email and started to discuss the matter. I sat and listened to what they all had to say, and of course when any weapon is found it is quite frightening as this is supposed to be …
The world is full of hierarchies, organized in distinct categories with distinct characteristics. Hierarchies have a sense of superiority and inferiority between the things being ordered, such as movie ratings. Movies can be rated in different categories, but there is a sense of one movie being better than the other movie, and then better than the next. This can also happen with people. Some experts, such as Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) say that …
As I read the section entitled “The Birth and Death of Slavery” in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the key role social cognition played in creating racial ideologies became abundantly clear. As Alexander explains in her historical analysis of the creation of race in colonial America, a fledgling country had certain capitalist needs for an increase in land and an increase in labor; in order for these …
The social constructs that define our reality seem so natural and organic it is as if they were created along with the four elements. But we know that things like race and gender were built by people in order to create a hierarchal society, so how do we begin to deconstruct the categories we both rely on and often cannot see? I suggest that the first step to deconstruction is changing how we describe our …
After reading the Devine article I became increasingly curious with the idea of how inevitable prejudice and racial stereotyping really is in today’s society. In Devine’s article she states “Inhibiting stereotype-congruent or prejudice-like responses and intentionally replacing them with nonprejudiced responses can be likened to be the breaking of a bad habit” (Devine, P.G. 1989). There are many people who are under the notion that we live in post racial society; but as we have …