Week 2

Some of my reflections from this week include:

First of all, I don't really think racism will ever disappear unless we stop having to check what race we are on every college and job application and before every survey you take.  Having to select your race on so many things is making race important.  Using race as a factor in things like college admissions makes race very important, as a white female it was harder for me to get into college than any other group of people because white females do better than any other group of people in high school forcing colleges to admit less of them in attempts to make the school more diverse.  Also, I think that oftentimes we confuse race with culture.  For example, the statement Asians are bad drivers may be considered a racist statement, however after I thought about it, if the person driving learned to drive in a huge, crowded city in China, no wonder they're what Americans consider "bad drivers" they are used to driving under extremely crowded conditions, which makes that statement more about their culture and where they come from than their race.  Also, I think that racism is different between different races depending on how assimilated people of other races become in the United States.  I don't think that people typically see African Americans as not American-it's the black sub culture that people stereotype and attack.  This makes racism against black people different than racism against the stereotypical illegal Mexican immigrant.  A big problem people have with Mexican Americans especially is that their home country is right across the border so they're close to the culture they grew up in, they're not forced to give it up like many Asian immigrants who find it easier to assimilate to what would be considered American culture because they are so far away from their home.  I think this is another factor in why racism against Asians is different and sometimes includes positive stereotypes.  I also was thinking about how I wouldn't really consider Asians a minority in the Pacific Northwest, I mean UW is now mostly Asian students which could also make racism against Asians different in this part of the country.

When it comes to movies, I really don't like the majority of Sci Fi films and I'm not interested in futuristic media or gaming so I don't have many examples that come from that, however your mention of Joss Whedon during lecture made me think of TV and how none of his TV shows really have diversity-Buffy was pretty much full of white people too.  This also made me think of other shows on tv now and how oftentimes they're almost over diversified, like Grey's Anatomy.  If you walk into a hospital in Seattle, it's highly unlikely that there would be as many non white doctors as there are in the show and there would probable be more Asians.  However, at least when I watch the show, it's not something that I noticed beyond the first episode which brings to mind something one of my high school teachers said about Shakespeare which is that race doesn't matter in theatre.  We had just watched a movie where Denzel Washington played a white man's brother.  Also, when you talked about Asians not being portrayed as heroes it made me think of two things-one, that there's an Asian character in Heroes (or there was I haven't seen any recent episodes of the show) and two, that the United States has basically kicked Asia's ass on a number of occasions, most importantly WWII and before the US was dominant, England pretty much kicked everyone's ass.  I think that it has more to do with history than racism.  Elsewhere in TV, there's Greek which has Calvin, the black, gay, fraternity brother.  Also, your discussion of science and the arts not getting along reminded me a lot of Bones which has a lot of non-white (and also not clearly any other race) characters and also often talks about the differences between Anthropology and Psychology, which the main character as an Anthropologist, rejects throughout the first season because it's not a real Science.  I guess basically what I'm saying is there are a lot of examples on TV of exactly what you're talking about and also I think shows like Grey's Anatomy show that racism is slowly going away, I mean it will never completely be gone, but I think many of the characters are cast because they are good actors not necessarily because of their race.  I think it's unlikely that race will go away for hundreds and hundreds of years if ever-I mean you talked about how you hung out with other Natives, people of other races tend to hang out with each other (that doesn't mean that they don't hang out with people of other races, but you see a lot of people hanging out with and marrying their own race).  Even though mixed race relationships are no longer frowned upon by the majority, I think it will be a long time before that will be the norm.  However, I do think racism, at least in the huge examples we think of in history, will go away.  Stereotypes will always be there, but I think eventually racism will be much less prevalent, think of how much less racism there is now than there was 60 years ago.  Then again, I should consider how I'm from the Northwest and racism is a lot less common here than it is in the South, but still, I think progress is being made.

Sorry I feel like that ended up being really long but I wasn't really sure what to blog about so that's what I came up with!