This week, I was browsing Buzzfeed instead of doing homework (as per usual), and I stumbled across an article/video about a “social experiment” done by two men: one black, one white. They parked their car on a public street and proceeded to fake break into the car and watch what happened. The white prankster tried for 30 minutes to break into the car, horn blaring, and nothing happened. A cop car even drove by and …
This week, a friend approached me with a news article from her hometown that she knew I’d be interested in. Upon reading it, I found that the ties to our class material could not be ignored. Chappaqua, New York is a wealthy town in Westchester county. Its citizens include former president Bill Clinton, along with many others who have large yearly incomes. The town, however, like most of Westchester county, is predominantly white. The lack …
Our discussion this past week, regarding the Lipstiz and Adams article, made me think about different moment s in our history, where if the proper steps had been taken, the fight against oppression for minorities could be much better off. The Federal Housing Act of 1934 is a good example of a chance that was squandered to aid in this uphill battle. This act, as described by Lipsitz, put the credit of the federal government …
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 …
While what would have been Trayvon Martin’s birthday recently passed, a similar trial was finished in court – the trial of the murder of Jordan Davis. On November 23, 2012, Michael Dunn pulled into a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. He saw a red SUV full of black teenagers playing loud music and walked up to them to complain. He thought he saw a gun being taken out, so he shot at the teenagers, killing …
In an article by Adams et al, entitled “Beyond Prejudice: Toward a Sociocultural Psychology of Racism” Adams discusses many misconceptions people have about racism in today’s American society. One point made stated that racism is a product of abnormal personalities. Most people would swear up and down that they do not have a racist bone in their body, because being called racist is a fear of many. The term “abnormal” infers that racist is not …
Many Americans have been following the Jacksonville, Florida case of Michael Dunn and Jordan Davis for the past few weeks. Dunn, a middle aged white man, fired ten shots into an SUV occupied with black teenage boys because of his frustration with their refusal to turn down the loud music they were playing. One of the boys, 17-year old Jordan Davis, was hit by three of those shots, and killed. Yes, you read that synopsis …
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 …
The Washington Post came out with a tongue-and-cheek article this past week on the complete and utter lack of racial diversity at the Olympics. The article tells the story of a black Olympic intern who was greeted in Sochi by a group of police officers who wanted to take their picture with him based on a fascination with seeing a black person in the flesh. Something else I learned from this article was that the …
Recently, I remembered a video I watched last semester in my Developmental: Inclusion/ Exclusion class. This video was from ABC’s What Would You Do; this video includes both a white and black actor who are stealing a bike from the park. Both boys have multiple different forms of equipment to remove the bike from the locked bike rack, both boys are wearing the same type of clothing. The only difference about these two teenage boys …
I recently watched a video from the What Would You Do? reality show about a black woman harassing a white woman because she is dating a black man. (You can watch the video here) The scenes were filmed in Denny Moe’s barber shop in Harlem. The black woman (Rachael the barber), white woman (Kristen the girlfriend), and black man (Gabriel the boyfriend) are all actors and the premise of the show is to see how …
For our contemporary racism class, we read an essay by social psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt. The essay summarized her and her colleagues’ work on the cognitive associations we make about Black people and crime. For me, the findings were like a knife in the gut: we have unconscious prejudices that we often aren’t aware of, that can have dire consequences. In one study, participants were either unconsciously primed to think about crime or received no …