Alexa – Contemporary Racism

The Importance of Talking About Racism

Alexa — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:41:13 +0000

After reading Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech and discussing it in class, there are two ideas presented in this speech that have been on my mind. First, Dr. King expressed that it is the social scientist’s responsibility to spread information to the misinformed whites of America. The second idea was a particular quote that Dr. King recited in his speech that really stood out to me. He quoted Victor Hugo saying, “If a soul is ...

The OJ Simpson Trial and Race

Alexa — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:11:41 +0000

When we recently read the Johnson et. al article, the main thing I kept thinking about was the OJ Simpson trial. As many of us known, OJ Simpson was accused of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and one of her male friends in 1994. There were many factors that made this trial of the most well known and controversial. One one side there was compelling evidence against him including, OJ’s past domestic violence issues ...

Aversive Racism

Alexa — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:31:27 +0000

“Color Blind or Just Plain Blind”- Dovidio & Gaertner Article This article by Dovidio and Gaertner directly relates to the discussions we had in class last Tuesday. The first part of this article explains the results and findings from both the study and article we read for Tuesday’s class (On the nature of contemporary prejudice-the third wave (Dovidio, 2001) and Aversive racism and selection decisions (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2000)). The previous studies we read dealt ...

Modern Racism & “The Color of Fear”

Alexa — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 13:20:12 +0000

The Color of Fear video clip The link that I posted is from the documentary “The Color of Fear.” I remember watching this in Multicultural Psychology last year, and after we read and discussed the Nelson chapter (Old-Fashioned versus Modern Racism) this is one of the first things that came to mind. In class we discussed modern racism as the conflicting feeling of negative attitudes towards blacks and feeling that racism is wrong. Other components ...

What Would You Do?: Racism in America

Alexa — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 21:26:34 +0000

The Macrae experiment that we read in class this week, (Stereotypes as energy-saving devices: A peek inside the cognitive toolbox) found that the use of stereotypes is actually a cognitive tool our brain uses. In the study, whenever a stereotype label was present (regardless of whether the stereotype label was present consciously or unconsciously) participants remembered more stereotype consistent words and performed better on the additional task than participants who were not provided with a ...