identity

Every. Single. Day.

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Every. Single. Time. I got a campus safety alert in college, I crossed my fingers and hoped it was not a black or brown man. I remember hearing people say to stay away from sketchy neighborhoods in Allentown, which at the time didn’t look too different from where I grew up. I heard people talk about going to White Wawa instead of Black Wawa or “Blawa.” Some people would drive out of their way to exclusively …

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Identity, Awareness, and Change

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Last semester, I took an introduction to anthropology course because I thought it would be interesting to learn about other cultures and societies. This class taught me many valuable concepts, but one word that stuck out to me was the word, positionality. Positionality refers to how anthropologists define their background and how their identities influence their research. I found this quite interesting, because it made me examine who I am and where I fit in …

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Complacence in the Classroom

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own racism. In class discussions of explicit versus implicit racism, I realized that although I am not an overt racist, I do (like many other White people in today’s society) exhibit implicitly racist tendencies. Over my education both in previous courses and this class of Contemporary Racism, I have become increasingly more aware of these tendencies and am actively making every effort to combat them. For example, …

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Overcompensation Doesn’t Improve Relation(s)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately in class about the tendency that white people have to overcompensate for the racist acts of other white people. For example, when a white person hears a story about another white person acting in a racist way or making a racist comment, they often react by making a dramatic claim in order to make it clear that in NO way do they associate with the racist belief system of another white person. In the …

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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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Cultural Appropriation or Racism

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While on another blog (tumblr.com) I read a post by blogger whitepeoplesaidwhat that really interested me. It reads as follows: “My culture brings all the Whites to the yard. And they’re like, “I’m taking what’s yours, Damn right, it’s mine and not yours! Want it back now? K fine but we’ll have to charge” There are many things I like about it. I like that it is blatantly saying that White people have knowingly taken …

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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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Power Differentials

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I’m very curious about how we experience power in our everyday lives. It seems to me that power is crucial in our social interactions. When we have power, we feel like we control our circumstances, bringing order to an uncertain and chaotic world. In our social worlds, there are power differentials. That is, people will encounter situations in which one person is perceived or actually has more authority, agency, or knowledge then the other/s. Social …

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The Majority vs. Minority vs. Other Minority Race (pun intended)

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A friend shared another blog with me recently, called Black Girl Dangerous, that I believe has a lot of posts and discussions related to this class.  One post (the link is at the bottom) called “Broke on Broke Crime: On Black and Brown Living and Unity,” written by Kitzia Esteva-Martinez, discusses her personal experience being mugged at gun-point by three young boys in her neighborhood.  Kitzia identifies as Latina and identified the three boys as Black in …

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Implicit and Explicit Prejudices

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It’s difficult to discuss prejudice without clarifying what it is. The fourth edition of the American Heritage College Dictionary provides four meanings for the term—from “an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts” to “irrational suspicion or hatred of a particular group, race or religion.” Both definitions apply to the experiences of ethnic minorities in Western society. Of course, the second definition sounds much more menacing than the first, but prejudice in either capacity has the potential to cause a great deal of damage.

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Stereotype Threat

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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 do worse on the test than if it were just for an exercise or something that didn’t quite matter. At the same time, if a black person takes a test in a room with white people and is aware that their intellect is being test, they will underperform. I find it interesting, then, that a white male would perform better when a certain stereotype about them is present as is the definition of stereotype lift.

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The Privilege Wheel

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For Wednesday’s class, we spent a good amount of time discussing the myth of the social identity, and the privilege wheel exercise raised some questions for me. For one, do certain aspects of one’s social identity have more power over the other? How much importance is placed on these aspects?

I personally believe that social identities are situational. To say that social identities are situational, I mean to say that when we are met with discrimination that threatens to diminish the standing of certain aspects of our identity, such as race, gender, sexuality, and religion more importance is placed on these identities. A change in environment, discrimination against those of our in group may heighten the importance of seemingly minor aspects of our social identity. For example, I do not define myself by my sexual orientation, particularly because the environment I live in is fairly liberal and accepting. I do not feel that I face discrimination everyday because of my sexual orientation. However, the homophobic backlash against the gay community brought on by the current Republican GOP election makes me place more importance on my sexual orientation. As the Republican candidates portray the gay community as immoral, sexually charged deviants and threaten to strip the community away of basic human rights, my identity as a gay male becomes more salient. Even though I don’t define myself by my sexuality, when faced with discrimination or threats against my basic civil rights and liberties, my sexual orientation becomes more important.

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