kw237335 – Contemporary Racism

Microaggressions and Being Assertive

kw237335 — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 23:52:39 +0000

As I was reading the blog posts regarding microaggressions, my mind quickly jumped to my Interpersonal Communications class and the book that we just read on being assertive. When learning about assertiveness, we learned that it is important in being assertive to stand up for yourself and say something to someone when they give you a certain look, or a microaggression. The book on assertiveness says that if someone gives you a look that you ...

Stereotype Threat

kw237335 — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 03:53:45 +0000

As I was reading the article by Kang and Banaji (2006) I began to really think about stereotype threat, stereotype lift and stereotype boost. I find it very interesting that many social categories perform according to the stereotype that has been placed upon them in many situations. If a woman takes a mathematics test in a group of people with men and women and she knows that her math intelligence is being tested, she will ...

Resisting White Privilege

kw237335 — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 01:43:32 +0000

In class the other day, Connie asked us what we could do in order to resist the privilege that we are given simply because we are white. After she asked the question, I tried to really think about how any white person could resist their privilege. It’s a really hard question to answer because there really isn’t a way that as individuals we can completely give up the privilege that we have been given. The ...

Can Implicit Attitudes Change?

kw237335 — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:54:09 +0000

After completing the IAT last week, I began to really think about the meaning of the test itself and whether the test is a reliable measure of someone’s unconscious thoughts. This thought became even more prevalent after reading the article by Blair (2002) and also the article by Karpinski and Hilton (2001). The articles seem to support the fact that implicit attitudes may be influenced and/or changed by environmental factors and outside forces. I have ...

The Challenge of Educating

kw237335 — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:11:07 +0000

In class last week we were challenged to try to explain to a typical white male that racism does still exist and that there are still inequalities between the races. Coming into this class, I had a bit of knowledge of the concepts we would be discussing in class. I also knew that one of our goals for the class would be to learn to educate others on racism and its current existence. The only ...

“We Are Not to Blame” … Or Are We?

kw237335 — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:58:57 +0000

Lipsitz (2008) discusses the thoughts that a sixteen-year old high school student expressed to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. She said, as I’m sure many other white men and women have, that she could did not believe that white people owe black people anything. She claims that because our ancestors were the ones that were responsible for slavery that we should not have to pay the price for what they did. As I ...