Week 1 racial experiences

The films we saw today brought up many important points. We do not think about how one sided our thinking and learning is. Like I stated in class when I took a Latin American class it shook a lot of my beliefs and the things I thought I knew. Micheal brought up something that I think we all aspire to when he said he does not want to be known as a black man but instead a man. America as a culture needs to get rid of the qualifiers that we use. In the film when Victor blew up, it was understandable, unfortunately though it reinforced the stereotype of the angry,violent black man. Dr Massey once told me that stereotypes are the brains defense against information overload. To stop stereotyping and racializing people, we have to consciously retrain our brains to think in a more individualist way. We need to wait to get to know someone before we judge them and judge them as an individual. As Adichie states in her speech we learn about one dimension or view of the world and do not think to question what other points of view there may be or how someone who sees the same event from a different framework may view it differently than we do. Schools and textbooks have much the same problem they teach from one point of reference and never question how other frames of reference may see the event differently.