First Hand Experience

The reading from this week made me think of a paper I wrote last semester. In a methods class I wrote a race and ethnicity analysis on a SNL skit called, "The Blackness Scale." It was a skit that involved two actors, one white and one black, pretending to be Samuel L. Jackson and Al Sharpton. The two men used a scale to measure Obama's degree of blackness. As they moved a cut out of Obama's head up and down the chart, they depicted his amount of blackness when they referred to stereo types that would make a person be considered either more blacker or whiter.
With this being said and after our class discussion on Wednesday, I thought it would be a good idea to show this clip to a couple of my friends. The outcome was tons of laughter and everyone thinking it was okay to laugh because it wasn't my friends who were making the fun. When I absorbed the overall reaction of my friends, I felt I might have laughed as well if I had not been in class on Wednesday. Instead, I came to realize that my friends were unconsciously being racist.
Eventually I told my friends the purpose of me showing them the skit. When they determined that their reaction to the video wouldn't consider them racist or not, it helped me experience Trepagnier's theory on Silent Racism and understand that their are shades of grey when determining the degree of a racist person.