Month: April 2018

Today was the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. People around the country were honoring what he’s done for the United States and the black community.

Today, there was an email sent out at around 4:40 PM stating that there would be a gathering in honor of remembering MLK at 7:00 PM. If diversity is so important to the college, why were students just now hearing about this event at 4:40 PM, the day of ? I would like to point out the black community as well for always talking about how we (black students and Wooster at large) have to stick together, but as I walked up to the event, there were about 12 people there and only 4 were black. I think it’s a shame for the community and college to contradict themselves on what their values are and what actions are actually being taken to accommodate those values.

This article made me realize how deep the roots of white supremacy ran in the world. America was already home to so many race issues, and beyond America, the same race issues were present. White people from Europe were trying to claim parts of Africa as their own, invading and colonizing. On a large scale, the struggle was between the workers/oppressed and the controllers/claimers. White people in the working class who suffer similar oppression under the privileged community were STILL siding with the upper class. In this case, lower class whites aligned with other whites in the name of sticking to their race. This idea of white supremacy was evident globally and in America. Racial separations at this time were stronger than class separations, even though class separations directly disadvantaged people of all colors in the working class.

Reading the Civil Disobedience article made me think about how normalized white southern violence was during these times. It seemed like basically the author was saying if the black community acted out in civil disobedience, then they know what’s coming to them. The author seems to say “We all know how the south can be”. This enables white southern violence instead of condemning it. Instead, it appears that the black community is being condemned for trying to stick up for themselves in the face of white violence.

White violence was pushed under the rug while the black community was criticized for wanting to do something to fight it.

While reading “Brown as a Cold War Case”, I noticed that the value of context in relation to historical events is great. In high school when I learned about the Brown Case nothing beyond what it was and what it did was taught or discussed. Through reading this article, it relates the case to what was going on in the world at the time and emphasizes the importance of considering context when studying history.

Since the Brown case was an international story and America was under a microscope because of their leader role in the Cold War, I wonder if the result would have been different had there been less publicity and attention. Is the public attention what swayed the case?

Context is so important because it influences events so strongly. Merely studying the event itself isn’t deep enough because there’s so much happening around it that shapes it.

Implicit bias is the idea that people create certain judgements on a person’s character based off of their race, gender or physical appearance. It has been generally accepted that all people have implicit bias, however research from a Yale University Child Study Center has found evidence of implicit bias among preschool teachers. This could possibly help explain why young black students are expelled or suspended from school far more often than white students. The study also showed that black teachers recommended longer suspensions regardless of the child’s race or gender.

In the research, 132 teachers were asked to watch video clips of preschool children and to note instances of challenging behavior. The videos were filmed using actors and didn’t include any signs of trouble. However, eye tracking software showed that the teachers spent more time looking at black children than white children. In particular, they spent considerably more time watching black boys. This study suggests that some preschool teachers expect trouble from certain students based on their race and gender, and if this is the case, additional training for these teachers would be needed to rectify these assumptions.

The study also found that white and black teachers evaluated a child’s behavior differently depending on their race. When asked to read about an instance of misbehavior from a child with a stereotypically black name, white teachers were less likely to say that the child’s misbehavior had been severe. This could suggest that white teachers hold black preschoolers to a lower standard; they expect misbehavior from black children and so acting out is not as much of an issue for them.

It’s unlikely that preschool teachers are intentionally prejudiced against certain students. However, with black preschoolers almost 3.6 times more likely to be suspended than white children, it seems implicit bias could be shaping teachers’ attitudes towards young children.