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 …
After reading the articles that were assigned this week I found myself becoming increasingly mad. I know it is our second amendment right to bare arms, and that it is the person behind the gun that has ill intent not the inanimate object itself. I still tend to find myself in utter disbelief at the sheer ignorance of certain individuals in this country, and their definition of “self defense” against people of color. Certain laws …
After discussing the Trayvon Martin tragedy in class this week, I felt very emotional and downright angry at how the case developed and was handled. How is it possible that George Zimmerman was able to kill an unarmed teenager and walk away a free man? While I do feel that many factors led to a jury finding Zimmerman not guilty, one detail of the case has stood out to me – the Stand Your Ground …
After reading the Eberhardt article, I was left thinking about how her studies can be seen in the media. There are plenty of TV shows, movies, and books about the criminal justice system, and I started thinking about how her findings show up in these media outlets. The first thing I thought of was an episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, where a rich white celebrity shoots and kills and unarmed black teen. …
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 …
I had brought this issue up in my journal entry and thought that it would be a topic that maybe some would like to discuss. Some of you may be familiar with Richard Sherman’s interview with Erin Andrews after a NFL playoff game a few weeks ago. Sherman came off as very egotistical and arrogant to the public because of the words and tone that he chose to use. All forms of the media …
Martin Luther King’s address at the APA’s Annual Convention in 1967 featured many points that he wanted to make about events from the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War. His main goal, however, was to address this audience to let them know that the social sciences had a place in this fight too. By saying statements such as “Social scientists…are fortunate to be able to extirpate evil, not to invent it” he is suggesting …
New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio recently followed through on his campaign promise to reform the city’s “Stop and Frisk” policy. “Stop and Frisk” is an NYPD program in which police stop a person and search him or her for weapons and drugs if they appear suspicious. In practice, people of color are stopped at a much higher rate than white people. Last year, a judge ruled that this policy was unconstitutional and that …
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 …
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 …
After our class pulled apart a speech that Obama gave before he was elected president in 2008, I knew that I wanted to pay extra special attention to his first State of the Union speech of the new year. The former speech had been constructed around comments made by Reverend Wright, the former pastor for Obama and his family. Reverend Wright made comments about the state of the country in terms of race, and how …