One of the things that are interesting from the video is that we as a society have been taught to be discriminative when we are still children. The video is about opinions from children about other races such as Arabian, Chinese, and Black. I was quite surprised of the reaction from the children when they are to compare between an Arabian and an Asian. They said that the Asian guy is more kind than the Arabian. ‘Weird, mean, and scary’ contributes to Arabian and black races, while ‘nice and smile’ contributes to Asian and White races. This shows that even though the children have not been exposed by the tragedy in this world such as ‘911’, the children is exposed implicitly by our society. The children managed to discriminate by the differences in skin colors, and also face expressions. This video follows up the discussion from class about something that our ancestors did in our past and we are the ones who live with the “karma.” Imagine if children were exposed to the tragedy of ‘911.’ I think they would stereotype Arabians even more. The only thing that crosses into my mind about this behavior is that the brown and black has negative or a conflict theme, while white color represents and symbolizes purity, cleanliness, and innocence. I think the children saw the parallel connection between the races and explicitly convert it to two sides, the good and the bad ones.
My own stereotypes have definitely comes from the part of the society that I have been exposed to since childhood. Basically, it all came from my own parents. They always have told me not to talk to strangers, which mean that I already discriminated people when I didn’t know them. In Indonesia, we have not been exposed to different races not as much as Americans are. So, we tend to show more discrimination. I think that we can’t get rid of our discrimination as long as we still have differences in this world. When a person is from different societies, people will have different opinions and thoughts about that particular person and that behavior shows discrimination. That is why we can’t truly get rid of our stereotypes.
4 comments:
Wow. Your post is very interesting.
I your example from your own life is interesting.
I studied abroad in Italy and found that many people felt things that might be considered prejudice here. And I wonder if like you said that has something to do with many Italians being Italian and its less of a mixed salad bowl like in the states (that's the new term they are using in schools now instead of a melting pot).
I meant to say "Your example from your own life." Ignore the "I"
What if we changed the ideas of "discrimination" and "stereotypes" to 'differentiation' and 'differences'? Are there ways to still appreciate differences without assigning binary values like "good" and "bad"? Can we think about humans in multiples rather than in terms of 'same' and 'other'? I wonder how we can critique the logic of 'types'; wouldn't this do more justice to 'individuals'?
What one wants to stress about this 'news' video is that it instructs just as much as it seems to conduct an experiment: these children are (sadly, in my opinion), being taught to see people in terms of binaries ('good' & 'bad', 'nice' & 'mean', 'teacher' & 'criminal') that are staged by way of juxtaposed skin colors. This seemingly objective inquiry, in other words, is teaching people to think about difference in terms of binary oppositions and value judgments. The video thus reflects key ideological limits of this sort of thinking about race and identity.
Some of your sentences need reworking. Take your first sentence: "One of the things that are interesting from the video is that we as societies have been taught to be discriminative when we are still children." Here are some edits:
"One of the things that IS interesting..." (one is singular)
"we as societies"—who is this "we"? Can you talk in such a huge sense about plural societies? This phrase is vague and risks sounding unhelpfully expansive.
This sentence also makes it sound like "societies" can be "children." While certainly one might be able to talk about a 'young' society, your sentences seems to conflate the individuals *in* a society (the 'children') with societies (plural) as whole entities. Do you see what I mean?
I think what you want to say in this sentence is something like this:
"One thing that is interesting about this video is the way that it appears that some people learn to discriminate at a very young age."
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