Thursday, December 9, 2010
Race
I feel like I already knew that what people consider to be "race" wasn't biological, but it was still really interesting to have the knowledge put to use. We did a classification activity with like 10 sports balls, and I thought putting them by "type" instead of "color" was the less offensive way of doing it. However, many of the balls couldn't be used for playing the sport that they look like they belong too, so my categories were too constraining for what it should have been. I realized after the activity, that even though I don't think about putting people into categories by the way they look, if I can't even figure out how to do it with balls, I may accidentally be doing it in real life too. So from now on, I'm going to try and actively not put people into categories by a first impression. Race is another social construct that I'm going to try and break free from.
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I agree that after that whole ball activity, it made sense to me that we, as individuals, tend to put people into these different categories, and split everyone up into different unique categories. Race is so complicated to me but honestly, all I know is that, racism is everywhere and will always be all around us.
ReplyDeleteI thought by categorizing the balls by size, it would also be less offensive, but it was still really hard to decide which category they should be in if they were really similar.
ReplyDelete"We did a classification activity with like 10 sports balls, and I thought putting them by "type" instead of "color" was the less offensive way of doing it." I agree with you. If a white person sees someone with light dark skin, that white person might classify them as black, but they could be a different race.
ReplyDeleteI think no matter how you try to categorize people, you're always going to make a mistake. If you're always going to make a mistake there's no point in categorizing. Why do we need to group people anyways?
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