education

Institutional Racism on college campuses: I, too, am Harvard

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  http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/21-black-harvard-students-share-their-experiences-through-a The article above was introduced to me recently by one of my friends. While I was going to write about something different this week, this article captured me. Entitled “I, too, am Harvard” you see a preview of a photo project from 21 students of color who attend Harvard university. Each is holding a black dry erase board which dons a common phrase that they often hear and has in some way effected …

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Color-Blind Education

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Lately, I have been thinking a lot about color-blind ideology and how it affects our school systems. It is interesting to think about the fact that some educators endorse this color-blind ideology and can not see the potential negative effects it has on children. When I think back to my experience as a child, I try to remember how my elementary schools teachers approached students of color. Unfortunately, it is not something that I can …

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Jane Elliot – Your Thoughts?

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Here is the link to Jane Elliot conducting one of her Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes prejudice education workshops. Do you think Jane Elliot went too far, or did she teach the students a valuable lesson using this method? (http://www.upworthy.com/i-never-thought-id-want-to-high-five-a-teacher-for-yelling-at-a-student-but-i-was-wrong)  

Low Prejudice/High Prejudice

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Something about our last conversation in contemporary racism was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I knew it had something to do with how we had discussed the low prejudice versus high prejudice participants in Hodson, et al (2002). We discussed how “high prejudiced” participants from a sample of college students really represents the “low prejudiced” end of the general American population. We discussed that this is due to college students …

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Aversive Racism In The Schools

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As part of my research in the Education department, I am presenting on a panel about race and education. The goal of the panel is to illustrate the different school districts in the area and the relationship between the prominent race in each school, the average socioeconomic status of students, and overall “success” of the school according to the state. The idea is to start a conversation about why the schools that are predominately African …

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Life Lessons in Youth Media

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It is always interesting to me to see how psychological theories play out in real life, as well as in the media. I am curious as to whether these occurances are purely mapping an academic concept onto a convenient pop culture item or whether the creators of the content are intentionally trying to teach lessons in an attempt to build a more tolerant future. One such example came to mind, an episode of The Fairly …

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Racial Discrimination; Not a Thing of the Past

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“There is someone who will suggest that racism is a thing of the past” (Tatum, 123). Whenever we discuss in class that people truly believe that racism is a thing of the past and that there is no more racial discrimination I find it to be mind-boggling. Today, there is still stereotypical images of people of color on the media, there is still discrimination within communities and articles written about racial biases. In my opinion, …

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Privilege Role Play

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While browsing the internet I came across Jane Elliott’s Brown Eye-Blue Eye experiment. For those of you who are not aware of what it is, Jane Elliott separated people into two groups based on their eye color (brown eye or blue eye) and created an environment where one group (the blue eye group) was discriminated against. The brown eye group was seated in a room and Elliott instructed them on ways to treat the blue eye group once they entered. A few of the instructions in the video I saw, Angry Eye, included calling the college aged men in the blue eye group “boys” instead of men, treating them as inferior “because they are inferior,” and not letting them succeed “because if they succeed we have failed.” The people in the blue eye group sat on the floor of a waiting room and entered the room with the brown eye group without any prior instruction. Elliott serves as both an instructor and a facilitator for the interaction.

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College denies diversity?

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In this blog post I want to bring up something that actually discovered earlier today. A friend of mine transferred from Muhlenberg to Smith College, an all girls college in Massachusetts a couple years ago. When speaking with her today, she told me about a Smith alum, Anne Spurzem, who posted a letter about how adding diversity to Smith College is virtually ruining it. Here are two links that discuss (and present) the letter to the editor:

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Contact Theory, Controlled Thought, and the Fundamental Attribution Error

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In our class focused on aversive racism, we examined an article by Patricia G. Devine. Devine’s article consisted of three related studies which focused on the mental processes of both high-prejudice and low-prejudice individuals. Devine’s first study found that high and low prejudice individuals are aware of the same stereotypes. Devine’s second study looked below the surface of consciousness, and found that when people, whether they are high or low prejudice are not aware that they are being primed with stereotypes, they will behave in a way that is dictated by the stereotypes. The third, and (in my opinion) most important study affirmed that there are two distinct routes that people encounter when engaging in stereotypical thought (clarify: thoughts about stereotypes). The first route is the automatic route, that is, when a stereotype comes to mind, the mind automatically processes it, and people automatically use the stereotypes. The second route is the controlled route, which occurs when people get the opportunity to control their thoughts before using or not using stereotypes. It is through the controlled route that we see the distinction between high and low prejudice individuals. High prejudice individuals, when given opportunity to control their thoughts, still use stereotypes to direct their thinking. Low prejudice individuals, on the other hand, take the opportunity to control their thoughts and actively avoid the use of stereotypes in their thinking.

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The Challenge of Educating

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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 way that we can try and change the way things are is to educate others about what we are learning. I didn’t realize, however, how hard it could actually be to explain to someone that racism does in fact exist and that simply in being a white person, you are a racist in this society. I understand the concepts that we have learned and being educated on the topic in multiple classes, I understand that racism does exist, that being white comes with a privilege that minority races do not have, that we categorize people automatically when we meet them, that the categories that we create then infer characteristics about a certain group. Without even realizing it, we automatically assign someone that we have just met into a category and assign certain characteristics to them without even getting to know them.

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How can we fix it?

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This week in class we discussed psychological reasonings behind prejudice and racism. Through a couple readings we discovered that humans categorize others through an implicit automatic mechanism. Without even realizing that we are doing so, we are judging a person within seconds of looking at them, placing them into pre-made categories that society helped us create throughout our lives. Stereotypes form these social categories, which then become further reinforced whenever we believe that we witness a person fulfilling a stereotype. On the bright side, this research shows that humans are not deliberately placing others in categories, or more specifically, whites are not deliberately demeaning blacks and other minorities as “less than” them. However, this psychological mechanism implies that human’s brains are hard-wired to act this way, and once there categories are formed, there’s nothing we can do about it.

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