Friday, January 7, 2011

Race, prejudice and crime

After a great discussion today in my class on stereotypes, prejudice and racism, I have decided to bring next week materials about racial profiling, inadequate racial arrests, court injustice and so on, as most of my students couldn't believe there is something wrong with the justice system. They indeed believed that there are more Blacks in jails, because Blacks commit more crime.
Well, work to do!
I will post here whatever useful links I find, to have them in one place. 

LAPD Officer: I Can’t Do My Job Without Racially Profiling - COLORLINES
NYPD - Frisking 88% Black and Latino males
Drug sentencing reform
Frisking - video and article
Interview (video) with Michelle Alexander on racist disproportional arrests for drugs
Disparities between marijuana usage and arrests between white and black youth
Racist bias among police
More NYPD racist frisking policy

Sunday, January 2, 2011

What would YOU do to get a job?

I've read yesterday a short article on a sensational DailyMail, linked from HP. Interesting discussion followed. I observed a few different tendencies among the commenters. Some were simply disgusted with the picture of round worms. Some made fun of the stupid Chinese who would eat anything, others made fun of the stupid women who do such things... Some discussed the deeper problems - the unrealistic burden of fitting a particular (thin) expectation and more and more difficult job market, where the employers might pick and choose, forcing people to do very questionable things simply because they have no real choice.
We know already that fat women are paid less, hired less and generally considered lazy, stupid, unskilled, with will power or self-control. The women are already burdened with unrealistic expectations just to be accepted as attractive females, no job interviews in sight yet. Twelve year old girls on diets... what is more disgusting? This or swallowing round warms? It's a difficult choice to make.

I spent couple hours yesterday researching and googling for images to use in my "Body and Sexuality" class. We have been already discussing a bit the problems of assuming overweight people are that way because of not taking care of their health or overeating. I want to discuss more with them on the societies imagery and the extreme pressure for both men and women to obey the, often unrealistic, expectations.

Below is a sample of vintage ads. It's interesting that it was much harder to find the accurate spot, as both too skinny and fat was forbidden...










Of course it's pretty obvious that for both men and women the only incentive to be "slender" is to be accepted and considered attractive by the opposite sex. What is more annoying in the case of women, that it's assumed it's their fault if they lose the interest of their husbands. Both in the ads about weight loss, various cosmetics and home appliances, it's a woman's job to "keep the husband".

And for the end, a very interesting ad... it looks like China is not that far from the Western Culture after all...