Stop Before You Stereotype

I was born in a land littered with Confederate flags. Each flag you drive past holds generations worth of harmful stereotypes about Black Americans. Even if you aren’t from South Carolina, like me, stereotypes are constantly around us. They are found through our thoughts, conversations with others, information from the media, etc. Once we understand that a stereotype exists, what do we do with them? Do we let them control our thoughts and interactions? And …

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Stop Normalizing Black-Crime Association

Something that has especially stuck out to me over the past few weeks has been the ideas presented in an article we read by Jennifer L. Eberhardt on ?Enduring Racial Associations African Americans, Crime, and Animal Imagery?. Within this article, she discusses the stereotypes associated with Black people in relation to crime. She also discusses how there are many factors that influence this, such as the stereotype of blacks as being hostile, dangerous, or criminals, …

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Black Children At Risk

Children of color are at a high risk of being negatively impacted by implicit prejudices and biases. The way that people manifest their prejudiced beliefs can be dangerous to children’s ability to learn and be successful outside of the classroom. In a study done by Goff et al. (2014), children of color were much more likely to be perceived as older than they actually were. Young boys of color are then treated as older when …

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A Conversation With a Cop

I recently met a police officer two years older than me. I started talking to him and having friendly conversation before learning that he was a cop. Naturally, upon finding out about his career, I asked him his thoughts on the current Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality. His response was “Yea, it’s a shame that it was a few bad cops. I work with hispanic people and stuff. I’m definitely not racist.” This …

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The Disturbing Phenomenon of Missing White Woman Syndrome

On the news, think about the last time you saw media coverage about a missing young, attractive white woman. Now, what about a woman of color? Do you often see extensive media coverage about a missing person of color? I didn’t think so. This phenomenon has been called “missing white woman syndrome” – the term used to describe when missing upper-class white women make up a majority of the media coverage surrounding disappearances as opposed …

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Why is black skin viewed as a weapon?

One of the leading causes of death for young black men, is police brutality. Young black men in their mid to late 20’s have about a 1 in 1000 chance of being killed by police (source needed). For many of them they are murdered while they are unarmed and are committing no crime. However, we can see time and time again white mass shooters being taken alive in the most difficult of circumstances. Yet while …

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Kids are Still Kids No Matter their Skin Color

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 …

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Gender, Queerness, and Performative Masculinity as an Escape: An Analysis of Moonlight

In her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, Hortense Spillers argues that the gendered configuration for Black people through slavery and its afterlife is “the dehumanizing, ungendering, defacing project of African persons” (Ziyad, 2017). She points out that, historically, Black gender has not been used to indicate a shared womanhood or manhood with people within white society, but to highlight how black people are out of step with womanhood and manhood. Essentially, Black gender can never …

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Race, Terror and Mass Shootings

White males do the majority of mass shootings, yet people tend to associate violence and crime with people of color and minority groups. When the Stoneman Douglass school shooting happened it was rare to see media outlets talk about the shooters history of violence against minorities and it took days to find out that the shooter was apart of a white supremacist group. If this were a person of color someone associated with the Muslim …

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Mass Incarceration: Not Just a Social Problem

https://www.flickr.com/photos/breadfortheworld/21685440474

Today when we talk about mass incarceration, many people may think that we are talking about a social problem. Yes, it is a big social problem, since America has become the country with highest incarceration rate for years, which is much higher than the incarceration rates of all other western industrial countries. Although each year the United States federal and states government spends about 70 billion dollars on incarceration, some prisons like which in Texas …

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Getting Away With It

I have scrolled through my Facebook and found far too many videos’ that capture police brutality. There are very few times I have been able to go on my Facebook feed without coming across a video that captures racism in violent acts. After which I would leave and log off of my social media. Not only has there been an increase in media coverage of these events but  there has been an increase in occurrence …

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Offensive Graffiti at Our College

I learned last week that we had an incident at our school with someone writing an anti-Semitic and sexist comment in one of our dorms.  I had a conversation with the Dean of Student Life about it. The RA and Head Resident Assistant were apparently alerted that the comment that was written on or near the door of a student.  The comment was taken down within four to five hours after being written. Campus Safety has been unable …

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