Crossing Invisible Line
How does pop. culture teach race/ethnicity?
It was a struggle for my group to come up with examples of how invisible lines are crossed through pop. culture We did, however, come up with a few, pretty obvious examples: dance, sports, and intelligence.
First, the example of dance is an example as the typical idea taught, is that black people can dance, white people cannot dance. Which the same goes for music, black people are thought to be very well tuned rhythmically, while white people are not. Somebody in the group commented, "Yeah, but everybody can dance!...When they're drunk." (haha) This concept is somewhat blurred, although most people become professional dancers when they are intoxicated, the sterotype still stands that white people are lacking in musical, and dance skilled areas.
Second, sports also are most clearly stereotyped with white people being less athletic than black people. To quote our text, it also stated that black people have been proven factually to be better swimmers because of their build. Our ideas were in more opinionated, obvious examples. Such as the fact that most professional basketball players, and in some cases football players are black. Perhaps, not intentionally, but in some ways proving that this is for a reason, and that reason being that black people are more highly skilled athletes. This isn't to say that the stereotype is that NO white people are good athletes, this is just the general idea.
The last example is of how intelligence is taught, in that the Chinese culture is generally thought of as the smartest. Think of in movies, and just growing up, they are always thought of as being steps ahead of other countries, and often play the highly intelligent role in life. Again, this isn't to say that other people are dumb, but that generally we were taught that Chinese people are smarter than others.
This discussion was interesting, and very hard to actually discuss in that, we were not brought up to think like this. This is the first time I have had to purposely notice these things.