I was really going to try to make an effort not to write negatively (or “hate on” as this originally read) my parents for the rest of the semester. I have already hit my father pretty hard in my journal, and, honestly, my parents are getting me through one of the toughest transitions of my life. My parents are the best parents a person could ask for, so hope this does not come off as me hating them.
This is 2012…isn’t it?
As I have watched the news and blogs lately I am shocked and saddened over the direction it would appear the United States continues to head. I think at this point we can all agree that this country is far from enlightened when it comes to issues of race and interracial interaction. I think it is also safe to say that we all are painfully aware that there is a lot of work to be done however; does it appear to anyone else that instead of progressing forward we are seeing a delve backward?
Taking The Next Step
Throughout the past few weeks I have noticed many people posting comments about Trayvon Martin on Facebook. Their comments range from different news articles, pictures of a boy holding skittles and their own personal opinions filled with anger at the injustice of the situation. Whereas I am glad to see that these individuals are clearly outraged by what happened, I also know that these postings are their only efforts to speak out against this problem. Many of the postings I have seen were from students here and the number of postings I saw that demonstrated disagreement did not match the number of people who attended the talk about the Trayvon Martin case at the Multicultural center the other week, as I did not see any of my peers who were posting these things in attendance.
The Help and Oscars
Last week in my Psychology of African Americans class, a student presented a PowerPoint on the latest book she had read: The Help. When I saw the movie this summer, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of a White woman speaking on behalf of Black women—which is ironic as White women have been a source of oppression to Black women. In blog post by Miss Caldonia—which was written on the blog “The Ladner Report”—the author expresses similar sentiment. She writes about her experience as being a maid to a White woman, Jo Lee, and describes being asked to perform disgusting tasks, such as cleaning the period stain out of her underwear. Miss Caldonia writes, “There is nothing glorious about cleaning up after dirty people and nothing like being exploited by people who don’t give a damn about you…can you imagine Jo Lee writing a book about me, my feelings, dreams, thoughts, aspirations and goals? Can you imagine Jo Lee being able to step out of her role of racial superiority long enough to give voice to me and my family? (Caldonia, 2011). The author certainly has a point, but why is it that the story glorifies the exploited work of Black women? Why was there such frenzy around this book? Was it White guilt, or something else?
Privilege Role Play
While browsing the internet I came across Jane Elliott’s Brown Eye-Blue Eye experiment. For those of you who are not aware of what it is, Jane Elliott separated people into two groups based on their eye color (brown eye or blue eye) and created an environment where one group (the blue eye group) was discriminated against. The brown eye group was seated in a room and Elliott instructed them on ways to treat the blue eye group once they entered. A few of the instructions in the video I saw, Angry Eye, included calling the college aged men in the blue eye group “boys” instead of men, treating them as inferior “because they are inferior,” and not letting them succeed “because if they succeed we have failed.” The people in the blue eye group sat on the floor of a waiting room and entered the room with the brown eye group without any prior instruction. Elliott serves as both an instructor and a facilitator for the interaction.
The World as a Mob
So, as many of you may know, I am part of an all male music group here on campus. My involvement in this group has been a source of laughter, an immense amount of fun, and, of late, a really interesting focus group of people to think about from a social justice standpoint.
The group, when it comes down to it, are really a social experiment in a pietri dish. This experiment is one that is really important: what happens when you put 17 males in a room. The vast majority of these males are white and extremely privileged. People love to watch these males perform, and thus they, well…we, have a large platform to display our privilege.
The Unknown Gravity Of Stereotyping
The following links provide news coverage about an assault that took place at Trinity College, which is about 15 minutes from the town I live in CT.
The victim was a Sophomore at Trinity College and the incident occurred in the early hours of the morning on Sunday March 4, 2012. Trinity College is located in Hartford, Connecticut, an area that does not hold a very good reputation for being safe. The second link is the first article I read about the incident a day after it had happened. It does not provide a description of the suspects’ or provide much information about them in general. The feeling I got from reading the article (the second link) was that Trinity’s Campus Safety needs to do a better job of protecting their students from crime that may occur on campus and incidents occurring with people who aren’t members of the Trinity Community (people who may live around the campus and have easy access onto the campus).
Microaggressions and Being Assertive
As I was reading the blog posts regarding microaggressions, my mind quickly jumped to my Interpersonal Communications class and the book that we just read on being assertive. When learning about assertiveness, we learned that it is important in being assertive to stand up for yourself and say something to someone when they give you a certain look, or a microaggression. The book on assertiveness says that if someone gives you a look that you take to be a passive aggressive way to discount you or what you are saying or doing, you should say something along the lines of “I’m not sure what you mean by that look. What were you trying to say?” The book explains that everyone has a right to assert himself or herself and stand up for themselves when it is necessary. However, while reading the blogs I realized that being able to be assertive in many situations is a white privilege.
Trayvon Martin
Though overt racism is no longer condoned in American society, it has been demonstrated that implicit or unconscious racism is still at work today. Whether known to the individual or not, racist beliefs and attitudes could greatly affect one’s behavior toward a member of another race. The case of Trayvon Martin screams explicit racism with a capital “E” letting me know that explicit/overt racism is alive and well in American society. A young black man is shot dead because he was in a hoodie and in a gated community. The shooter has yet to be brought to justice. The father of the shooter ( who is white), wrote a letter stating that his son George Zimmerman is not racist because he is Hispanic and grew up in a multicultural family. This leads me to the readings I have done on a different kind of racism, that kind of racism is horizontal racism. Horizontal racism is defined as the results of people of targeted racial groups (Blacks, Latinos/Hispanics, Asians, Native) believing, acting on or enforcing the dominant (White) system of racist discrimination and oppression. Horizontal racism can occur between members of the same racial group or between members of different, targeted racial groups. Why then can we suppose that the Florida authorities are not charging Mr. Zimmerman with murder? He clearly has an extensive history of targeting blacks. A news article stated “At the very least, a series of 46 emergency calls made by Zimmerman over the past six years document a man vigilant about keeping his neighborhood safe and orderly. The calls include complaints about unruly people at the pool, potholes, dumped trash, and kids playing in the street. In recent months, as the neighborhood saw an uptick in crime, including burglaries and a shooting, Zimmerman’s calls had focused on specific suspects, the majority of them young black men”
Trayvon Martin: ‘Racism without Racists’
Everyday people of color, especially young men of color are profiled. They are seen as criminal, unsafe, suspicious, etc. Unfortunately, this issue has to be brought to light to the eyes of many Americans through the story of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was shot and killed for appearing “suspicious.” Trayvon was unarmed, wearing a hoodie, and about 100 lbs lighter than his killer, George Zimmerman, but for some reason Zimmerman felt threatened. Zimmerman has yet to be arrested under a self-defense claim. Normally, in cases of self-defense, the one claiming self-defense bears the burden of proving that is the case, but in this particular situation, the police have chosen to take Zimmerman’s word for truth. It took three weeks for this story to receive the attention it deserves, despite the recent emergence of a socially aware group both for and against Kony 2012.
Making Excuses
In the film The Blind Side while the “white” women were eating “$18 salads” at a restaurant, Sandra Bullock’s character asks if any of the other ladies had ever been to the “other side” of town after some teasing remarks, the one woman stated; “I’m from there, but with a little hard work and now look at me”. For me this resonated with the frameworks we discussed in class on Wednesday and how if “they” just worked harder they too could live the “good life”. It also brought to mind Trayvon Martin and the way that people have stated that “if he had dressed differently” he would not have appeared to be “suspicious or threatening” again; change and conform to white society and everything will be just fine.
Stereotype Threat
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.