Keith – Contemporary Racism

Unable to Tune Out Racism

Keith — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:10:18 +0000

This Spring Break taught me, or perhaps a better way to say it is illustrated for me, that as challenging as this class is when we are participating in discussions, reading seemingly endless stacks of articles, and writing papers, the real challenge of this class transcends the classroom or any assignment we could ever be given. The real challenge is that no matter how hard you try you cannot forget, even for a little while, ...

Eurocentric Racism in the Classroom

Keith — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 03:38:16 +0000

As they so often do, our discussion in class this week reminded me of one of the most influential teacher’s that I’ve had the privilege of learning from at Muhlenberg, Dr. Charles Anderson. Our discussion of how racism directly effects the testing ability of black youth made me feel as if I was right back in introduction to African American Studies and I had to re-visit one particular article that I felt was so relevant ...

Modern Clark Study

Keith — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:12:02 +0000

During Thursday’s class discussion, we compared speeches from Dr. King and President Barack Obama. Though forty one years apart, we agreed that the speeches called for similar action; time had not changed much. I found the same to be true of the results of a landmark social psychology study. In the course of reading James Jones’s article “Psychological Knowledge and the New American Dilemma of Race”, I found myself wanting more details about the Kenneth ...

Where Do We Start?

Keith — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 16:58:10 +0000

During our class this Thursday we briefly touched on the impact of both laws and public opinion on human behavior with particular concern to attitudes about racial issues. In Rebecca Kook’s (1998) article The Shifting Status of African Americans in the American Collective Identity, she traces the development of the African-American identity in America through landmark events in our history driven almost entirely by public opinion. As her article makes painfully obvious, most positive progress, ...

Trying To Get Rid of My Bias

Keith — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:04:38 +0000

Last week, I wrote about how the challenges of this class extend far beyond anything that can be explained on a syllabus, and this week I suppose is more of the same. However, what I’ve been struggling with this week, or rather the past couple of weeks, is the comment Jordan had heard and brought up in class. The specific comment, which I believe she said was made by a fellow student in another one ...

Is “Coming Out” beneficial to homosexual black men?

Keith — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 07:57:54 +0000

In class we have been heavily discussing stereotypes the past couple of weeks and although we have not limited the scope of our discussion to stigmatized groups, it seems those with the most salient stigmatizations inevitable surface in our discussions. This led me to wonder about people who had more than one stigmatized identity, and more specifically, identities that were in conflict with each other. The group I eventually settled on was homosexual black men. ...