Today race- relations are significantly better than that of 50 years ago, but from what I've heard, differs through some regions in America. As a whole, the American people tend to generalize and stereotype races leading to intentional or unintentional discrimination. Meaning that whatever deep-set notions we have in our mind, inadvertently causes us to act a certain way towards a race without us noticing.
There have been studies conducted where they show a group a bunch of pictures of African Americans very quickly and then quickly show a screw driver, they then did this with pictures of Caucasians. The viewers claimed that they saw a knife in the set with the African Americans and a screw driver in the set with the Caucasians. I'm sure that some of these people thought of themselves as unprejudiced and unbiased, but the way that society has portrayed races has caused us to have this mindset. Additionally, there was a big case where an African American professor at Harvard had just returned from a vacation and while entering his house there was a malfunction of sorts with the key and gave off the image that he was breaking in. The police were called and he was arrested for breaking in, until they could verify his identity. This begs the question, would this have happened if he wasn't black?
Our society tends to classify these people based on their race rather than their person. My personal experience with race-relations have mainly just consisted of odd looks, and the occasional moving away. For the most part, even when I travel a little upstate towards State College, I find that people are always extremely pleasant and don't seem to have any reservations about those of color. I am extremely proud that we live in a nation where almost all of society does not discriminate against specific races or ethnicities.
No comments:
Post a Comment