The Significance of Social Cognition in Determining Racial Ideology

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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 …

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Don’t We All Culturally Appropriate?

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In light of the recent posts regarding the performance of historical dance works by Muhlenberg College students as cultural appropriation, I find myself questioning cultural appropriation, its nature, what is appropriate, and what is not. To put it even more simply, can anyone really emulate someone else’s experience via performance? And if not, what is the point of performance, if it is not to express an experience of an artist? In my opinion, it comes …

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The “Bad Kid”

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I went to the same public school system for first through eighth grade. My town was not that large, so the size of my grade never exceeded 70 people. Aside from a few students who moved either to our town or out of it, the kids who were in my class stayed relatively the same each year. The reason I’m writing about this is that it recently occurred to me over these eight years, there …

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From Blackface to Blaxploitation: Racism and Representation in Entertainment

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At some point this week, I came across a BuzzFeed post entitled, “The BuzzFeed Black History Reading List,” which included a series of essays and articles reflecting upon the end of Black History Month. One of the articles in this post shines an accusatory spotlight down on Hollywood’s use of Blackface today. After some initial disbelief and some precursory digging, I found the amount of performers who have performed in blackface appalling and the names I …

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Supremacy and Privilege: The Insidious Consequences of Language

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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 …

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Thoughts on Color-Consciousness

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Originally published March 17, 2014 The recent literature in social psychology and other disciplines is clear: colorblind racial ideology is a harmful way of viewing the world. By ignoring both the material disadvantages faced by people of color and the implicit racial biases that influence decision-making, subscribing to colorblind racial ideology leads people to ignore the realities of racism in modern America and thus oppose policies that would address racial inequalities. In a recent class, …

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Does Black History Matter

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Originally posted February 24, 2014   While stumbling around the internet this week I came across two articles that made me stop and think, this can’t be real. http://jezebel.com/last-night-on-jeopardy-no-one-wanted-to-answer-qs-about-1525439303 The first one that I came across was about Jeopardy, which on the night of 02/17, had a category called “African-American History.” The panelist were all white college students and they avoided the topic to the best of their ability. Reading the comments under the article, …

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Who are They Really Surveilling?

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I recently read some news that made me think a little more critically about authority. On the Highlands Today newspaper website they said that as of this week the officers of Lake Placid Florida would began to wear camera’s attached to their uniforms to video record their interactions with civilians on duty. This means that their patrolling, arrest, and other things that they do on their daily rounds will be recorded and under review! This …

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Are We Beginning to Chip Away at Mass Incarceration? An Example from New York State

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Last week, our class discussed mass incarceration, the system by which a vastly disproportionate amount of people of color are imprisoned for the use or distribution of illegal drugs. The situation is quite bleak; the system has been escalating for the past few decades and has wreaked havoc among communities of lower class people of color. Nevertheless, there may in fact be a ray of light at the end of the tunnel. Throughout the country, …

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Spending privilege

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Recently I was on imgfav and saw a picture that was asking why doing something like calling a white person worthless is mean, but saying it to a black person is racism. I think people forget that racism is about power. It is about a majority oppressing a minority. It’s hard to remember sometimes because it’s easier to see oppression than privilege. This is why people who try to fight racism often end up in …

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