Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: The Racial Grammar of Everyday Life in Contemporary America
There was an extra credit opportunity last week that some of you took advantage of...if you went, please write up your thoughts about the talk as a comment to this blog post. If there were relevant connections to psychology and law, note those as well.
Going and hearing Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva speak was very interesting and educational. I found I learned a lot from hearing him speak. Dr. Bonilla-Silva spoke on racism in America today. He touched on things like movies and how it is evident that although we have black hero and heroines, they still are stereotyped. He used examples like TV show series that have an all-white cast but to create diversity will introduce a black character or some other ethnicity. After only a few episodes however the character no longer has a place on the show. Movies were pointed out as well. In the movie Hancock, Will Smith plays the main character as the superhero; however, he is a drunk. He also points out that in movies where a black person is one of the main parts, there is almost always a white person playing the other part. The reason being because lots of people will go to see a movie with white characters or the surprisingly even more popular white and black leading role movies, put two black characters playing the leading roles and not as many will go. Unless of course it’s a comedy such as “Madea”.
Another aspect of racism still thriving in America today deals with missing persons. All of us are aware of Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson, and Natalee Holloway. Around the same time Elizabeth Smart and Laci Peterson went missing, so did girls of a different ethnicity. One of whose decapitated body was eventually found. Has anyone heard of those girls however? No. And why not? Because they are not white, and white people make the news more often than non-whites, unless of course it’s for being arrested. Deviance is another interesting aspect of the white vs. non-white stereotype. Did you know white kids are anywhere from 6 to 10 times more likely to do hard drugs, drink alcohol, or sell drugs. Yet this isn’t something that’s advertised either, because we’re a white supremacist society.
I’m really glad I went to this talk. It opened up my eyes to the small ways in which we still favor whites, and has made me become more self-aware of this issue.
Extra Credit Blog:
I made it to the speaker a little bit late on Friday due to a meeting at 11:00. It was very interesting and I am glad that I went. When I arrived the room was packed and I stood in the back. The topics that I remember most were the statistics that he referenced and the everyday use of words incorrectly. The first that comes to mind is when Bonilla-Silva showed us a bottle of body lotion. The label said it was for ‘normal to dark skin’. I am sure this is something that I have read a dozen times but it never occurred to me. Maybe I didn’t notice because this is a true description for me or maybe this is because I have been raised in Iowa and I come from a predominantly Caucasian community so this would be true for the majority of the people that I know or have been raised with.
The next reference that Bonilla-Silva made was to a quote from a newspaper or magazine. It was referencing the first lady Michelle Obama. The article said that she was wearing a ‘skin-colored’ dress. Then we were shown a picture of Mrs. Obama in the dress. Needless to say it could be assumed that the author or editor of this writing was probably Caucasian. Obama was wearing a beige colored dress. If it is going to be referenced as skin-color one should probably be comparing it to the person’s skin who is wearing the dress. But, again when he said this and I saw the picture it took me a second to realize what was off about this comment or description.
The next pieces of information I remember were in reference to crimes committed particularly in schools in the United States. He referenced school shootings where the shooters were white and how much publicity they received. These schools were normally in suburbia and afterwards all of these families and the students (especially) received grief counseling. Then he talked about what happened when there is a shooting by a minority student in the inner-city. Not much attention is brought to these situations and there is no grief counseling for these kids. We just assume that this is something that happens all the time in ‘these places’. I hate to admit it but when Bonilla-Silva was discussing these two scenarios I was thinking exactly what he was saying. I thought that inner-city school shootings happened all the time and there would be no way to supply these students (all of these students) with grief and other forms of counseling that would be helpful. How stupid is that? This reminded me of the difference between the amount of crime that is committed by white Americans and black Americans compared to the amount that are in jail. It is disproportionate. Just like we assume that more minority or black children would have and bring weapons to school in fact the opposite is true.
Overall, it was a very interesting speaker and I am glad that I was able to attend. I look forward to attending more speakers like this while at UNI. I wish there were more publicity given so that we would know where and when. It’s a good opportunity. Especially this topic in this area. We are no exposed to very much racial and ethnic diversity, but it is important to be aware of these differences, errors, issues and to have respect for differences among people.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Speech
I attended the Friday lecture by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. It was pretty interesting and I felt like it was informative. Throughout his lecture he focused on Racial Grammar and talked about what it has to do with society. One thing that he talked about was movies and television shows. He also talked about weight and how different cultures have different denseness of bones. One thing he talked about that hit me was the fact that colored children who go missing don’t get as much publicity as white children. I am going into both psychology and criminology so I found that to be eye opening.
The first thing that I thought related to psychology was the whole section about movies. I think that this relates because of the fact that producers and directors know what the majority of people want to watch. In his lecture he talked about how the most popular movies are the ones with both black and white leads. If you notice the majority of movies are white based. Since I am a white individual I had never really paid much attention except for the fact that in killer movies the black person almost always dies first. Some other information that he gave to us was about how when a black person is the hero he is looked at as a “magic negro,” as Eduardo put it. He said this because of the movie Hancock. In that movie he is seen as magical and every time he gets close to his white co-star they both start to loss there powers. So as he put it the people have to reinforce racial boundaries. They do it in that movie by showing that they can only live happily if they are as far away as possible from each other. One movie that I think really shows the reinforcement of racial boundaries is Princess and the Frog. This movie really shows that because of the fact that yes there finally is an African American princess, but they show her as being poor and she is a frog for three fourths of the movie.
Another thing that related to psychology and law was the “Beauty and the Beast” section. This relates because of the fact that some people have brought the fact up that white children who have gone missing are more publicized. This is just shocking because of the fact that whites aren’t the only children to go missing. Colored families have applied this information to get there children onto the news so that they have just as good of a chance of getting their children back. Another thing that goes along with this is that white people who have gotten into a violent situation are more likely to be taken to a grief counselor right after the incident, but colored people aren’t likely to get that luxury. People could use this information to apply it to society today, and try to change the way that crime is noticed. Everyone should have the right to go to a grief counselor if it is needed.
This doesn’t really have to do with psychology, but it was funny when he talked about it. He said that he and his wife went on weight watchers, and when he got on the scale the people told him that he needed to lose fifty pounds. This made him upset because he said they were calling him fat. As he looked into why he would weigh that much he came across information that said that people of African ancestry have 5-15% denser bones. This led him to look into Dr. Paul Broca who studies weight, among other things. The quote that Eduardo used had information in it that said, “The brain is bigger in a mature adult than in the elderly, in men then in women, and in superior races than inferior ones...” I found that interesting.
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva overall had a very good speech. I found him hard to understand sometimes because of his accent, but overall was enlightened by what he had to say. I was able to notice that movies and television shows have some racial issues. The only time I have ever really noticed this is when the movie Princess and the Frog came out because that was a means to solve some of the issues of only have white princesses. Eduardo also talked about how our ancestry can alter how we are physically just based on weight. Still the main thing that I will take away from this lecture is that all colored of people shouldn’t be discriminated against especially when it comes to kidnapped children.
When I first starting to listen to Eduardo speak, I thought it would be very hard to get anything out of the speech because I could not understand what he was saying half of the time. Some things he was talking about weren't very clear to me due to the language barrier, but from what I understood from his presentation gave me mixed feelings. Many people said they were inspired by him but I truly didn't believe his speech was inspirational. He did bring up some good points, but I also didn't agree with some of the things he brought up.
One thing I did not agree with him about was how racism is starting to go back to the way it was. I do not agree with this. I feel like racism is still a hot topic because people make it evident and will not let it disappear. People bring up actions other people do which are not intentionally racist and make it racist. When people pinpoint petty things to make it to be racist, it annoys me because it won't let the situation get better and I feel like people will always do it. Our society will not get better if we do not make things out to be racist that are not racist. When he brought up the movie The Blind Side as "white people saving black people", it angered me. The Blind Side is a rare and inspiring TRUE STORY. I am sure if it were a white male in the same situation a movie would be made about it. I feel like people look too into things and make it out to be the worst, kind of like subliminal messages. I feel like the message was more of a put down to whites than it was trying to make it a message for everyone to be treated equally. I felt the presentation was more racist towards whites singling us out and making us out to be bad people victimizing other races, when I feel that is not the case.
I did agree with his presentation about underrepresentations of minorities in films. I feel like this is getting better in Hollywood but it is still mainly whites who appear as main characters. I feel like Samuel L. Jackson, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman trump this case though.
It did relate to psychology in the sense of white students getting immediate grief counselors dispatched to the scene of a shooting compared to black children having to resolve grief issues themselves. This enables the white children to have a better recovery in life that the black children who may never get over it. He did not have any specific examples though which made me weary on the credibility of the subject. This also relates to law when it comes to white missing children appearing more in the media than colored missing children. Alexis Patterson was not given as much attention in the media as other missing children which I felt related to law. This relates to law because when the police are looking for her perpetrator, it makes it more difficult because the public doesn't have much knowledge of the case and what the police are looking for in the criminal. This makes it harder for the public to help.
Overall I felt it was not a very credible presentation with little references and facts to back it up. I felt it was more of an opinion based presentation geared towards white people as the perpetrators to the colored victims. That is another way I related this presentation to law. It was almost as if the speaker was trying to get into our heads and change our way of thinking about racism. Kind of like an interrogator tries to get into the suspect's head. I felt like he wanted me to confess to being racist and treating colored people differently and having me make a false confession to something I do not do.
I went to Dr. Bonilla-Silva's talk about racial grammar last Friday. I took quite a few notes about it, because he had a lot of interesting things to say. He said that racism is so deeply engrained in our society that we don't always see it, but when we do, it's pretty obvious. He brought up such issues as how if there's a minority character as the main character in a movie, they're always being saved/helped somehow by the white person (he used The Blind Side and Avatar as examples). He also brought up how Nancy Grace refers to missing/dead white girls as "beautiful," and stories about white people become universal. He brought up how Elizabeth Smart went missing and everybody knew her name, but nobody knew the name of a black girl who went missing at almost the exact same time as Elizabeth.
He brought up how there is blatant racism in advertising, such as a skin cream that's supposed to make your skin go from "normal to darker."
He also brought up how after Columbine there was immediate grief counseling for the victims/families; however, every time there's an inner city shooting, there's no grief counseling, and the black/other minority people in the community get shamed for allowing such behavior in their community. He really put it into perspective when he suggested us to think about what would happen if black people shamed the suburban Columbine community for allowing such violence in their community.
This speech really meant something to me, and I am glad that I went. The extra credit would be nice, but I also gained something more out of it. It has opened my eyes to all sorts of racism that I never even realized. Also I feel more comfortable creating an open dialogue to discuss these things with people from all races.
I attend Dr. Bonilla-Salva's presentation about racial grammar Friday. I was quite impressed by the number of people that attended. They ended up having people standing in the back of the room and sitting on the steps. His talk was basically about how races that arent white are downgraded and no looked highly upon. He had said how the white guy is always the superior one and other races follow the white guy. Even in movies where a black guy is the main character, like in Handcock, where Will Smith is a super hero, but he is bad at it and tries to do good in all the wrong ways until this white male comes along and shows him how to be a good super hero and to have the public look at you positively.
He also show how many people believe that a black student is more likely to do drugs, sell drugs, or bring a weapon to school, but statistically a white student is more likely to do any of those things. This is was able to easily realty to psylaw. Like we had mentioned earlier in the semester hispanic and black males are more likely to be convicted of a crime over a white male or female of any race. This is all based on stereotypes we have developed and causes our mind to automatically label someone as guilty before we even know anything about them.
The thing that really struck me as interesting and disappointing is when he brought up the recognizable names of white children that had gone missing, and then brought up names of Hispanic or black children that have gone missing and no one knew who they were. It makes you wonder why media gives so much more attention to a white missing child, when there is not difference. Any and all missing children need to be publicly know so they are found.
This was, overall, not my favorite speech Ive been to. I think that some of his points are valid, but some are not. His speech is very one sided and opinion based. Im not saying that these inequalities are out there because they are but i feel that as more generations that come the more equal everyone is becoming, including men and women being treated as equal and i think that these are things that will change with time.
I attended the guest speaker Eduardo Bonilla Silva. I found him to be very difficult to understand what he was saying, making it harder to fully understand everything that he was saying. After this event I had mixed feeling about what to think about what he presented. The main thing I believe he was trying to say was that racism is caused by white people and it is a white person problem.
He mentioned something that stuck out to me most over all of the other things he talked about. Bonilla silva said that white people missing get more publicity than african americans and hispanics. He brought up several examples like Lacy Peterson and Elizabeth Smart. There was people from other races that went missing around the same time but it wasn't in the media at all. This is not fair, everyone should receive the same amount of attention and an equal chance of finding their missing person. I have recently paid more attention to this and have noticed that there has been media coverage about the girl from california who went missing that was hispanic and also there has been information about the Trayvon case in the news as well. Bonilla Silva talked about how in movies and tv shows they often times convey the racial minority as needing/getting help from white people like in The Blind Side. I don't understand how he can use that as an example in his speech because that movie is a true story. They didn't alter it. Also I believe that if in real life it was in fact a white boy who was in the same situation the story would use a white boy they wouldn't change it to a black individual. Some of the other things he pointed out was that compared to the typical stereotype that blacks are more likely to do drugs and be involved in illegal activities its actually the opposite. Whites are more likely to do all of these things. This relates to law because in class we talked about how blacks are more likely to be convicted for crimes such as rape and they will be punished more severely. Another important thing he brought up was that after a school shooting such as Columbine counselors would come in and help in the white community. Where as in a black community a shooting wouldn't receive counseling and it would be viewed as their fault. Some other interesting things he pointed out was that on a lotion it was for "normal to darker skin" making you think that white skin is "normal." Also he showed us a picture of Michelle Obama at some award ceremony under the picture it says she was wearing a skin colored dress. It was a beige color or what a white persons skin color would be. These two last examples definitely show racism.