Color is the biggest divider of races, and plays a major role in many of the problems in contemporary America. I really liked what Marqui and Trevor where saying about stereotyping and how it is much more common than racism; however racism still occurs. Stereotyping based upon color difference has become such a part of our daily regimen that it is basically a part of our cultural DNA. Racism has been around for longer than it hasn’t, and because it is a thought process it is difficult to combat, particularly when these thoughts are passed down from one generation to the next. I know for me I live in south Florida, which is extremely culturally and racially diverse. Since I have been exposed to this diversity since I was born, I have learned to accept people of different backgrounds thinking them no different than myself. Like alcoholism , racism is hard to deny when you are surrounded by a culturally diverse area, but if you are never around it (alcohol), or in a place that is diverse, it is easy to overlook these obstacles and maintain that you are not racist or an alcoholic.
Although we talked about both stereotyping and racism in class, and about how they are very similar, there is a fine line between the two. Stereotyping is a thought process that happens immediately upon an encounter, meaning that as soon as a person sees color or cultural difference, they form a set of beliefs based purely on what they see or want to believe about them. And while it does not necessarily demean the person being stereotyped , it nonetheless judges a group of people upon their own interpretations and experiences with people of that descent. For example, baseball pitchers are typically stereotyped as not too bright, when in fact many of them are, like Greg Maddox. Although racism is also a thought process , and is just as demeaning, the racist person typically believes that race is generally the only factor that characterizes them, and if you don’t like it you don’t like them, which usually leads to racist action, which is why everyone needs to try and reverse racist actions. No matter what anybody does you cannot change someone else’s opinion, however you CAN change their actions, and maybe in getting them to act differently towards persons who are different than themselves, you might change how they think as well. Living in South Florida has surely made me more aware of this than ever.
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One idea I'd like to think about is your statement that "racism has been around for longer than it hasn't." I hope that this class will offer us the opportunity to historicize racism a bit. Racism is, after all, a social construct--a human-invented idea with an historical beginning. That beginning coincides almost exactly with the beginning of the Atlantic chattel slave trade, and it gains depth and elaboration as people seek to justify enslaving Africans and--after Abolition--seek to justify keeping people in a condition similar to slavery.
ReplyDeletePrior to 1500, light-skinned Europeans and dark-skinned Africans likely would have looked strange to each other. Europeans might even have connected the darkness of Africans' skins with European cultural ideas about night, darkness, and black as scary or negative concepts. But--and this is important--there was no widely-held belief that African people might not really be people; there was no widely-held belief that European people were inherently better or more valuable or kinder or safer than African people. Those ideas didn't even really start to gain a lot of steam until the 1700s.
So while racism has been with us for longer than the U.S. has been a country, in the long historical view, racism is relatively new. Does remembering a world before racism make it easier to imagine a world after it?
You are absolutely right, I was just thinking about racism in the United States, but now you made me aware of the broader picture of the issue. I never thought of it that way.
ReplyDeleteTaylor