Today, America still struggles with the concepts of unconscious stereotyping and institutional racism. Throughout the media, stereotypes are nailed into peoples brains from a young age so it's difficult to be completely unbiased towards one particular race, religion, culture, or lifestyle. For America to really start in on goals of equity and equality, we need to either stop putting stereotypes in the media or work to stop believing them. These stereotypes are a factor in institutional racism. Because there are statistically more black males in prison than white males, it gives the media the idea to portray the black race as more thuggish , which spreads the stereotype around and causes people to see them in that way and be more suspicious of their actions--which can lead to more arrests and imprisonments.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 60's can be related to the Occupy protests going on across the nation today. Like some of the Civil Rights protests, Occupy is a sit-in attempt to stop unfair treatment. In both cases, protesters were faced with police brutality in response to peaceful protesting. The Occupy protests are an example of how history can repeat itself with the same actions, but different causes. If we are to keep making forward steps as a nation, America needs to learn from its past and refuse to repeat past mistakes.
1 comment:
Like your experience, I thought that Rosa Parks was an old lady who was mistreated by the white bus driver and not a woman who planned to express civil disobedience right when she woke up on that day. I agree to your point that people today manipulate history on how people were back then and how they acted to have some control over our thinking. I think this is a way for them to have some kind of power over us and influence the actions we make towards our history. In addition, you are right that institutional racism has been exposed to people in a very young age. I think this is one reason why it is so hard to fight and end this kind of racism. Since we are familiar with it and it seems "normal" to us, stereotyping against other people seems right for us. To end this, I think people need to work harder to change that kind of concept for the future generation, like our kids. If the influence on the media and even people around our future kids are expressing any kind of stereotyping and racism, institutional racism will just be an unending chain.
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