This weekend, I went to Boston with my family. It was an extremely cold day, but I still loved exploring the city and the history it had to offer. There are a great number of street performers in this city, and we stopped for one of them-a group of men were performing a dance routine, and, at the end, they would flip over the hunched backs of four grown men standing next to each other. Of course, they completed all …
Dr. Jonathan Lassiter, a professor at Muhlenberg College, expresses in one of his works “Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination” how the psychological narratives of people of color is left out of most studies, but particularly in psychological research. He addresses how whiteness is so ingrained in society that even when one is asked to imagine a “person”, a white person is what first appears in their mind. He explains how white is synonymous for person and basically most aspects of …
Colorblindness is a way of talking, or more accurately, not talking about race. It is defined as “the avoidance of talking about race” (Apfelbaum et. al., 2008) and “an approach to managing diversity in which intergroup distinctions and considerations are deemphasized” (Apfelbaum et. al., 2010). Or in other words, it’s the melting pot myth, the idea that “we are all the same”, or that “we shouldn’t see color”. It manifests itself in classrooms when teachers avoid addressing race and prejudice, …
When it comes to police officers who murder young Black or brown kids, the important piece here is that the children themselves were performing harmless acts – yet those acts were seemingly threatening to a police officer. When has there ever been a White child who was sought after by a police officer for just playing in a park? These kids are just kids. Just because of the color of their skin does not immediately make them more dangerous than …