I have great students in Social Cognition and Stereotyping and Prejudice. They engage with the class material deeply and connect it to their everyday experience. They often comment about how much they see different forms of social cognitive processes and stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination all around them that they hadn’t seen before taking the class.
They have sent me some links to material online that I thought I’d share.
In Stereotyping and Prejudice, we have been studying prejudice and hate groups. One student sent a link to a page exploring the head of the Arkansas white supremacist organization, who lives in Little Rock’s “Heights” neighborhood, an area of relatively affluent “old money.” An interesting irony is that one of the photos shown from the organization’s Facebook page was of a birthday party at a local pizza restaurant, where all of the members were engaged in the Nazi salute. The ironic part is that the birday party was for a child (shown in a wheelchair) who is disabled. Such individuals were condemned to death under the Nazi regime in Germany as a threat to the integrity of the Aryan race. Click here for the page about the leader, and here for a page from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum describing the Nazi’s extermination of disabled individuals.
In Social Cognition, we recently covered ironic processes of mental control, and the fact that the more we focus on suppressing a thought, the more likely it is to affect our behavior. A student sent a link to a commercial for Expedia that illustrates it. Click here for the commercial.
Click here for a Buzzfeed page (inspired by something similar at Harvard) about the experience of stereotyping and prejudice experienced by students (usually of color) at Oxford University who are commonly assumed to have some “exotic” or foreign experience that makes them different/got them admission/etc.
A student sent a link to a video showing some children’s reaction to a recent Cheerios commercial that apparently cause some consternation among adults about it’s portrayal of an interracial family. Click here for the video.
We were discussing affirmative action and a student sent this:
This photo is what I was thinking of for our discussion of affirmative action last week.
http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff112/DeeOlive/toon2.jpg
Also this is an interesting website.
http://www.understandingrace.com/home.html
Apparently on campus there was a bit of an uproar over a party that was planned by some students and to which the entire campus was invited. The theme was implicitly racist, and so it naturally caused some consternation. I assume the students who did the planning didn’t realize the implicit racism in the concept:
“So, surprising news. Kind of gossip, but it pertains to class. The entire student body has been invited to a party named “Thugs n’ Kisses” and I don’t think I would see the perpetual racism of it if I hadn’t been in class. Students of all kinds are currently revolting. But I was just going to let you know.”
I sent the student a link to an article on how Halloween costumes represent racist ideology, implicitly and explicitly. Click here for access to the article. Here’s a link to another interesting page on a class project based on that article.
A student sent this link to an “experiment” (not really) that illustrated how attribution might be different for whites or blacks in terms of crime.