Month: February 2014

The Majority vs. Minority vs. Other Minority Race (pun intended)

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A friend shared another blog with me recently, called Black Girl Dangerous, that I believe has a lot of posts and discussions related to this class.  One post (the link is at the bottom) called “Broke on Broke Crime: On Black and Brown Living and Unity,” written by Kitzia Esteva-Martinez, discusses her personal experience being mugged at gun-point by three young boys in her neighborhood.  Kitzia identifies as Latina and identified the three boys as Black in her post.  She discusses her …

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President Obama and the Promotion of the American Dream

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After our class pulled apart a speech that Obama gave before he was elected president in 2008, I knew that I wanted to pay extra special attention to his first State of the Union speech of the new year. The former speech had been constructed around comments made by Reverend Wright, the former pastor for Obama and his family. Reverend Wright made comments about the state of the country in terms of race, and how frustrated he was at where …

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America’s “monumental” problems

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In 2008 Obama had the opportunity to speak about race with the whole world listening. He had to walk the fine line of a politically correct statement, or getting at the heart of real racial issues in our country. “Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, …

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Attribution Errors due to Negative Media Coverage

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After reading the James, Dovido, and Vietze article, “Social Cognition and Categorization Distinguishing Us from Them,” I have been thinking about stereotypes and attributions a lot. How do they start? Why do we still believe in them, even though we are constantly told that they are only stereotypes? While looking through the list of key terms at the end of the article, I realized that almost each term could be caused by the images and videos shown on the news …

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“History vs Reality”

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This week, a friend showed me a video she thought I would be interested in. Last summer, she worked at a camp called Literacy Through the Arts in inner-city Cleveland. On the last day of camp, each camper recited a poem they had written throughout the course of the summer. One boy, sixteen year-old Romell, presented a piece of slam poetry that related many important messages about the history and modern reality of racism. Romell opened his poem by saying …

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