I. Mendoza

Reflection Journal #2

Review-What did you learn?

            This chapter touches it very important concepts of our society; stereotyping, prejudice, and racism.  Although some people in our society wants to deny the existences of these concepts I firmly believe that they are constantly in our presence and these have frame the way we think, act and interact within each other. As Noel (2008) stated in the chapter “However, it is not easy, perhaps it is not even possible, to recognize that our identity is framed in part by such concepts as stereotyping, prejudice, and racism.  For we are all raised in, and have as part of our personalities, communities and societies that are historically informed by prejudice” (p. 44)   In other words, it’s hard to admit that someone is prejudice when he or she has being raised that way and those actions seem normal to him or her.  Therefore, in order for us to recognize prejudice we should developed a hermeneutical consciousness which is the process of looking back at your historically pass and seeing how it has affect you and shape you to become a prejudice person, and how is that affecting your present and how it will affect your future. .  I believe that when a person stop denying that he or she is prejudice and start admitting that he in one way or another is somewhat prejudice is the first step to rectifying his or her behavior.

            Another important concept that this chapter cover is “Stereotypes” as Noe (2008) stated in this chapter: “Stereotyping is the creation of mental categories in order to group people, items or events” (p. 44) In other words we all have one or two thing in common within a certain category and that applies for all the people that are from that particular country or race. For example to assume that all Dominicans are good dancers is stereotyped because my brother, father and sister don’t know how to dance. But the question is why do we stereotype? Based on what I have read and I totally agreed with it, we stereotype because in this era of information, we encountered so much information and experiences in our everyday lives that we have to organize them into categories to be able to assimilate all them.  Once we categorized and break them into chunks is easier to understand and make connections with these experiences.  So for us stereotyping served as a defense mechanism that we utilize to prevent the brain from becoming overwhelmed.

            We start forming stereotypes by identifying things that standout; we called this Salience or vividness.  And we can associate high levels of Salience with things that emotionally interest us as well as people that are close to us and the least levels of saliences with things that interest others that are not close or related to us. We also have to take into consideration the details, how long ago was the exposure to the information all of this are important when we are creating a connection and if it is going to be a long memory event or experience in someone’s life.   The problem with stereotyping is that we tend to focus on the negative aspect instead of the positive aspects.  Stereotypes can be based on gender, origin, interest, job, personality, hair color, race, etc.  When referring to people we tend to find connection with people that are like us that we find that they have a lot of things in common, which we called the in group.   The rest are the out groups people that are different from us that we don’t have a lot of things in common with them.  Once we make that distinction we look for differences between each other and decide if they are based on people’s personality or in the disposition of the individual behavior which is a negative typed of stereotype because it divide us and allows to feel superiors to others.

            This chapter also talked about a very powerful aspect in today society prejudice in comparison to stereotypes which allows understanding others prejudice is how we feel about them which in my opinion has a very negative connotation.  “Definitional, prejudice is a judgment about a certain person or object or event prior to understanding that person, object, or event” (Noe, p. 51) There are many reason why people can be prejudice such as racial, and cultural difference, economic competition, traumatic experience, frustration-aggression and social control, all of these played an important role as well as the social interaction between the person who is the target of prejudice and the person who is being prejudice.

            The chapter also touched on racism which is “the belief that a race is superior then the other” there are many reasons why individuals become racist, it could be the need of attention or need for approval by others.  In addition to that, it can also be institutional racism when a certain race is preventing another race to growth in their jobs.  Semiotics is a good example of how signs and symbols are embedded in our society and continue to foster institutional racism in our society, the best example are the brave symbols which ignore the suffering of Indians Americans and impose the thrived of mainstream and capitalism.

Last but not least, the chapter II goes over the effects of stereotyping, prejudice and racism. The effects stereotyping can be seen in a very broad spectrum such as: schools, society and people.  These are long term effects that affect the self-esteem of individual that at the end feel like they cannot accomplished anything in their life’s because they feel inferior and worthless, which in term creates a cycle which culminate dropping from school and not succeeding in life.

Reflect-What did it mean to you?   

Chapter two is a very interested chapter because it touches concepts that are sometimes hidden in our societies.  In my opinion, we all have being at some point in our lives racist, prejudice and created stereotypes about others, that are part of the human condition.  In my own experience, coming from Dominican Republic an island in the Caribbean which we shared with the country of Haiti.  Historically, we have encountered a lot of issues with the islands.  Haiti dominated the Dominican Republic for 30 years, creating frictions between both countries. After Dominican Republic gained it second independent (first from Spain) and second from Haiti, Dominicans became very prejudice toward Haitians and there have being many stereotypes associated with Haitians such as that all Haitians believe in voodoo and are warlocks.  Education is the number one equalizer, as I got educated and came the United States one of the most diverse countries in the planet, those stereotyped started fading away because I came across some Haitian that were educated, Christians and then I realized that I was making assumption based on what other people had told me about Haitians that I really did not had a good source to created stereotyped of them.  For me this experience was a reality checked because it showed me that we cannot believe everything that people say, we should judge for ourselves like the saying “don’t judge the book by its cover”   I really feel that education and exposure to diversity make you a better person, because you become more tolerant and more open minded.   You start to find that we have more things in common than difference.  One of the reasons why I wanted to become a Spanish teacher was because I wanted to exposed my students to diversity; I wanted to teach my students to embrace diversity.   Once we accomplished that, we become more united society.  Unfortunately, we live in a society were a lot of people are still closed minded and they are racist and prejudice towards other people creating divisions and disconnect in our society.  I just wish that as we move forward in this globalize world we become more tolerant of other people and find in them the beauty of their culture.  

Refine-How will you use the information in your classroom?

                I am currently a teacher at Norcross, what I like the most about NHS is that is 100% diverse.  In my classes I have students from all different ethnicities and social economics backgrounds.  My classes are composed of Hispanics (predominantly from Mexico), African American, Caucasians and Asians.  After reading this chapter I want to continue being tolerances towards my students backgrounds  and avoid creating stereotypes,  a good example of this is avoiding generalization in other words “not all Hispanics are illegals” “not all African American students are disrespectful” “not all Asians students are A’s students” .  In addition to this I will love to embrace my students background by incorporating their cultural backgrounds in my lessons, for example: one of my favorite holidays is coming up November 1^st and November 2^nd “the Day of the Dead” in a lot of different Spanish speaking countries in Latin American they celebrate this holiday by creating very colorful “altar” where they have picture of their loved one that have passed away, these are days of remembering their loved that have passed away.  I am planning on teaching about this event and to make it more relevant to my students I chose pictures of famous people and I tried to target people from different backgrounds such as: Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley, Mohamed Gandhi, Princess Diana and last but not least Selena Quintanilla.  In addition to that I asked my students to bring photos of their loved one that we could display in the altar.  After reading this chapter I realized that I must focus in creating lessons that are relevant to my students and the only way to accomplished this is by incorporating things that students can make connections so they can better assimilate the information and experiences.

 

Bibliography

§  Noel, Jana, Developing Multicultural Educators, (2^nd ed.) (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc, 2008)