social categorization – Contemporary Racism

You People

Milanis Rivas — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 22:21:25 +0000

Ezra: What are you saying? Mo: Black people and white people will never be cool, period. Ezra: What the f* are you talking about? Mo: The truth dog. Ezra: You’re my best friend and business partner. Mo: Yea, that’s how powerful this sh*t is bro. It’s kind of like when you cheat on a woman right? When you cheat on a woman you try and move forward but you never can. Why? ‘cause she just ...

Why is Psych So W.E.I.R.D.?

Emily Broadhurst — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:53:05 +0000

Psychology is constantly evolving, however that being said, it still has its flaws. Have you noticed that psychological research is biased? Early psychology is surrounded in white culture and unfortunately, it has led to current psychology remaining the same. The reason that psychology is grounded in whiteness, is due to the fact that white supremacy still exists and the lasting effects of it. The lack of diversity within psychological research is alarming. WEIRD stands for ...

Maybe Ignorance isn’t so Blissful

saltnpepper — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 16:16:10 +0000

A month ago, I would have been so utterly offended if someone tried to claim that I am racist, but now I read numerous articles each week explaining why every white person feeds the racism in our society and cannot help but agree. In no way am I proud to contribute to systematic injustices (especially those targeted at individuals due to their racial identity), yet I will humbly admit that my own ignorance encourages segregation ...

Describe Who?

Natstermac — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 13:16:27 +0000

If someone were to describe you, what are the first things they would say? How would someone describe me: a white, blonde, young woman. See, that wasn’t too hard to describe myself with the acknowledgement of my race. Now if I can use race to describe myself, then why is it so hard to acknowledge another person’s race when describing them? I ask this question with the knowledge that for most of my life, race ...

Let’s Be Biased Together

Ibrahim Sidibeh — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 18:39:35 +0000

I am biased. You are, too. Let’s accept it. Bias is an ingrained part of human nature. We all have preconceived notions, stereotypes, and biases that influence our thoughts, actions, and interactions with the world around us. However, the way our brains navigate the world and interact with every social environment we’re in, we NEED to have biases and generalizations. Our brains need to have shortcuts so they can function efficiently, and we don’t have ...

Shifting Away from Social Identities and Categories

Ivie Mims — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 17:24:43 +0000

Here with in the United States, there is growing demand for a societal change in how we currently conceptualize and value social labels. Social labels are seen as valuable because it allows us to easily identify, associate, and group people who share a social label. However the grouping of individuals based on their label into social groups like race and gender have been the justification for the perpetuation of systematic oppression for centuries. The oppression ...

Take a Knee

Morgan Weiss — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 20:44:10 +0000

Coming from a family with a military background and a brother currently serving in the United States Navy, the NFL protest of the flag has been very important to both my family and myself. Many NFL players, specifically Colin Kaepernick, decided to use their platforms to raise awareness about social issues that people of color face, such as police brutality, by not standing for the national anthem and instead taking a knee. Originally, I was ...

“Ethnic” as “Other”

Julia Beatley — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 20:09:16 +0000

There’s always a hair section at the supermarket: a section for hair — regular hair, normal hair, perhaps you would call it white women’s hair — and then a section dubbed “ethnic” for the other hair; it’s for the misunderstood hair, the hair that the simple “hair” section cannot provide shelf space for. The “ethnic” section is for black women’s hair. It is separate due to its other-ship. “Hair” and “Ethnic Hair” have been segregated, ...

Designated Survivor: A Hypersensitive Culture?

a_note — Sun, 30 Oct 2016 14:59:00 +0000

I sit down every Wednesday to watch a new show called Designated Survivor. The show revolves around the idea of the designated survivor: the person the government picks to stay home when holding the State of the Union address at the capitol. The reasoning behind the idea of having a designated survivor is in case something were to happen to all three cabinets of the government during the address, there is someone to take over ...

Phenotypes & Stereotypes

Jenna Lehmann — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 20:38:19 +0000

I drive three hours almost every weekend to go home to my family, and lately I’ve been listening to podcasts to help pass the time, namely RadioLab. I came across an episode from season five simply titled “Race.” There are a lot of interesting stories featured under this topic, but one in particular has kept me thinking long after listening to it. There has been this trend circling around the internet where people reveal the ...

Know Your Facts

a_note — Sun, 02 Oct 2016 17:59:17 +0000

Over the weekend, our campus emails were blasted with a message from campus safety regarding a gun, which turned out to be a BB gun disguised as a real gun near campus. My friends and I obviously all saw the email and started to discuss the matter. I sat and listened to what they all had to say, and of course when any weapon is found it is quite frightening as this is supposed to be ...

Psychological Parasites

Hannah — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 13:28:04 +0000

The world is full of hierarchies, organized in distinct categories with distinct characteristics. Hierarchies have a sense of superiority and inferiority between the things being ordered, such as movie ratings. Movies can be rated in different categories, but there is a sense of one movie being better than the other movie, and then better than the next. This can also happen with people. Some experts, such as Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) say that ...

The Significance of Social Cognition in Determining Racial Ideology

Anna Robinson — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:32:47 +0000

As I read the section entitled “The Birth and Death of Slavery” in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the key role social cognition played in creating racial ideologies became abundantly clear. As Alexander explains in her historical analysis of the creation of race in colonial America, a fledgling country had certain capitalist needs for an increase in land and an increase in labor; in order for these ...

Supremacy and Privilege: The Insidious Consequences of Language

Becky Goodman — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:06:15 +0000

The social constructs that define our reality seem so natural and organic it is as if they were created along with the four elements. But we know that things like race and gender were built by people in order to create a hierarchal society, so how do we begin to deconstruct the categories we both rely on and often cannot see? I suggest that the first step to deconstruction is changing how we describe our ...

Is Prejudice Inevitable?

Ave.MariaLewis — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 05:01:27 +0000

After reading the Devine article I became increasingly curious with the idea of how inevitable prejudice and racial stereotyping really is in today’s society. In Devine’s article she states “Inhibiting stereotype-congruent or prejudice-like responses and intentionally replacing them with nonprejudiced responses can be likened to be the breaking of a bad habit” (Devine, P.G. 1989). There are many people who are under the notion that we live in post racial society; but as we have ...

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

AmandaRG — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 02:24:45 +0000

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 ...

Attribution Errors due to Negative Media Coverage

Chelsey — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 18:23:27 +0000

After reading the James, Dovido, and Vietze article, “Social Cognition and Categorization Distinguishing Us from Them,” I have been thinking about stereotypes and attributions a lot. How do they start? Why do we still believe in them, even though we are constantly told that they are only stereotypes? While looking through the list of key terms at the end of the article, I realized that almost each term could be caused by the images and ...

“History vs Reality”

brianna — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 19:58:53 +0000

This week, a friend showed me a video she thought I would be interested in. Last summer, she worked at a camp called Literacy Through the Arts in inner-city Cleveland. On the last day of camp, each camper recited a poem they had written throughout the course of the summer. One boy, sixteen year-old Romell, presented a piece of slam poetry that related many important messages about the history and modern reality of racism. Romell ...

True Match Foundations: The Link Between Ethnicity and Foundation

nashkrod — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 01:55:38 +0000

L’Oreal has released a series of commercials that make me a little uncomfortable. The commercials are for L’Oreal’s True Match foundations which are supposed to “precisely match your skin’s tone and texture.” The commercials feature a few celebrities: Beyonce Knowles (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc50e02zDt8&feature=BFa&list=PLF68B3695EF7533DC), Jennifer Lopez (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njIKU3sZy4E&feature=BFa&list=PLF68B3695EF7533DC), and Aimee Mullins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0GbUTjQdaY&feature=BFa&list=PLF68B3695EF7533DC). The script for each commercial is the same. They start with “There’s a story behind my skin. It’s a mosaic of all the faces before it. My ...

How can we fix it?

AbbeyRab — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:38:07 +0000

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 ...

Group Identity and Assimilation

Michela — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:58:29 +0000

During a discussion about social identity theory, someone asked how race functioned as an identity. Social belief structure is defined by Hogg as, “people’s beliefs about the nature of intergroup relations and their assessment of the validity and effectiveness of different strategies to achieve or maintain positive intergroup distinctiveness,” meaning there is an emphasis on maintaining a group identity that is distinct from other groups, creating a clear “us” “them” dynamic. The five components of ...

But Cleopatra was Beautiful!

Alexis — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 04:56:49 +0000

I had a professor once who asked the class to close their eyes and envision the “perfect mate”. He then went around the room asking each student to describe their “dream” mate and marked it on the board. After every one was finished describing their vision he proceeded to explain to the class that every time he does this exercise, the “ideal” ends up being Caucasian, taller, blue eyes and light hair. While there were ...

Stereotypes as a Cognitive Tool

Jordan — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:52:09 +0000

I found the findings of the article “Stereotypes as Energy-Saving Devices: A Peek Inside the Cognitive Toolbox” by Macrae, et. al incredibly depressing. The researchers’ studies on both implicitly and explicitly presented stereotype cues revealed that stereotypes, like any kind of schema, save cognitive energy. Rather than analyzing the different traits of a new person, we subconsciously label them as part of a group. That way, we can instead use cognition to process what they ...

Stereotypes as Energy-Saving Devices

KristinK — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 00:51:09 +0000

After reading the article Stereotypes as Energy-Saving Devices: A Peek Inside the Cognitive Toolbox, I have thought a lot about how stereotypes are formed. According to the article we stereotype automatically without being conscious of what we are doing. It makes sense that we put people into certain schema’s, we do it with everything else however it is much more problematic to stereotype or put people into a schema than it is for us to ...