Stereotypes

This week in class we watched a movie called A Bronx Tale. It was about a boy named collodro who witnessed a murder by the neighborhoods mobster, Sunny. Collodro was asked About the murder and  denied that sunny commited the crime because a rat in their neighborhood was the lowest you could be. Sunny soon befriended him and gave him the nickname C. Throughout the entire movie there was a racism issue. People were separated by neighborhoods, blacks on one side Italians on another. Until one day Collodr rides with his father on one of his bus routes. There's a black girl who he finds attractive and after their first encounter on the bus he sees her at school and asks her out. The movie is filled with stereotypes, like when collodro meets Jane for the first time he thinks she is going to have an exotic name but in reality he's the one with the weird name, not her. Stereotypes like these still happen today  in the world we live in. Whenever I go to the city and drive through a prodominatly black area I get nervous because my whole life I've grown up around the ideas of stereotyping bad neighborhoods.

Groups

This week in class we learned about "in groups" and "out groups". When we walked into class we were separated into two groups, people who were wearing blue jeans and people who weren't. Then we were given 5 minutes to come up with reasons why the other group was wearing jeans or wasn't, depending on which group you were in. The reasons varied from "jeans were ugly", " because they wanted to",  "they were too lazy" or "they had no other clean clothes".  We then looked at the list and decided which reasons were judgmental and it turned out that the majority were. We did that because when people are categorized in groups they tend to judge others that are different. 

This happens all around us in everyday life. We have seen this happening back in the 1900s with the separation of whites and African Americans. This is still happening in our lives today, judging people based solely on looks. Most people try not to judge others, but its just the society we live in.  We have to be careful what we say or do to others because it affects other more than people realize. I see this happening all around me, sometimes I'm the one being excluded (out group) and sometimes I'm in the crowd (in group). It should be important to people to make sure that these "groups" affect people and how they act towards others around them.

social construction of reality

This week in class we learned about the social construction of reality, which means that the society that we live in influences how we experience the world around us. In class we did a couple of actives  which demostrated this idea, we looked at the difference that people see in spit and saliva. Saliva is completely normal when it is in our mouths, but the second it leaves our mouths as 'spit' people think it's disgusting. Why? It is because our society has created this idea that when saliva leaves our mouths it's gross, but really it's the exact same thing. Also we did an "Abandon ship" activity where we pretended to be 16 random people and we had to vote 7 people off our boat. People voted others off due to their backgrounds, for example I played an elderly women and the reason why I was voted off was because my character was old and had nothing to offer the group for 'survival'. The society there has created a view of what people are and are not capable of, therefore already desiding who was going to stay and who was going to be voted off.