I recently watched Australia, and was very supprised by the content of the movie. The trailer that I just linked makes it look like a love story that happens to take place in Australia, but that is really a second story line. Without giving away to much, the film is told from the perspective of a mixed race child, and the main story line is about race relations in Australia before and during WWII. It is very simmilar to the way we treated Native Americans here. The film is very long, but it provides a great social commentary on how the aboriginal people of Australia were treated.
Everyone should check out this website and the accompanying video! This has changed my entire view on the history of the United States in terms of racial relations between white people and black people. Is it possible that we have all been brainwashed through years of exposure to the superiority-inferiority of the two races? Would this explain why so many people still hold strong prejudices and/or are outright bigots?
I think that we, as a society, need to take a long look in the mirror and figure out where we have been in order to decide what we really are today. This does not only include the white race, but the black race as well. The perpetuating harm that is being done today through the media has ties to early advertising of slaves, mockery of black people, and early silent films. However, we do not even realize this because of how long this propoganda has been around. I don't know about you, but I totally buy into what Tom Burrell is getting at through this website. Check out Kim's post on Burrell's NPR interview if you want to hear more from him.
Howard Stern unleashed a vicious attack on Gabourey Sidibe on his
Sirius satellite show on Monday.
"There's the most enormous, fat black chick I've ever seen. She is
enormous. Everyone's pretending she's a part of show business and she's
never going to be in another movie," he said. "She should have gotten
the Best Actress award because she's never going to have another shot.
What movie is she gonna be in?"
I have grown to absolutely abhor the way in which some feel that the word "rape" is appropriate to describe things that aren't rape. To me, it is another example of inappropriate equivocation that cheapens the act of rape. To my knowledge (and the dictionary's) the word "rape" should be used only in two instances. The first is to describe the act of forcible intercourse upon an unwilling individual. The second is to describe a violent seizure, abuse, or plundering of something (i.e. the rape of a countryside). You can see in the examples given in the link that there is, at best, a conflation of the two definitions, and at worst a blatant disrespect for the actual act of person-to-person rape.
Finally, frequent usage of derogatory or pejorative language has been shown to cause more negative attitudes toward the target of the comment (Simon & Greenberg, 1996). Moreover, there continue to be staggering statistics regarding instances of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence in this country especially in colleges and universities (see RAINN website). None of these statistics includes "President Obama raping the American people's values" "Big businesses being raped" or "the private sector being raped by the government", because those are hyperboles that are being used to shock and therefore desensitize people to the actual issue of rape. This is sexism. This is unreported or confronted sexism.
This is a pimp named Ken who pimps all over the world. "Pimpin" is a form of power that one may have on another. This video shows some of the concepts he goes by also shows his reasoning. He is promoting his new book called Pimpology and DVD series which he explains 48 laws to the game of pimpin. What is the psychological aspect they use to get the women? what is wrong with the thought process of a PIMP and HOE? Does our US government pimp us?
Today I want and saw Shutter Island. I'm not going to go into any spoilers or anything, but you should all go and see this movie. It is a very well done movie on a number of levels, but I think it is more interesting for psychologists because of the setting in a 1954 mental institute.
The reason that I think this belongs here is because there is a theme brought up a couple of times during the film about prejudice toward those with mental illness. Once a person is labeled as having a mental illness there is pretty much nothing they can do to get rid of the label. It is different than being of a different race or gender because it is a diagnosis, so people feel they have more of a justification for prejudice against those with mental illness. The film also points out that in a lot of cases if a person trys to argue that they don't have the illness it feeds into the diagnosis, or people just won't listen to them because they are labeled as mentally ill.
I know that Dr. Brown does some research on the stigma that people have toward the mental illness, but I don't know about any research being done concerning discrimination against them. I'm sure it is happening somewhere, I just haven't seen it.
This is a link to the trailer for " The Devil Came on Horseback". As you can see in the trailer it is about the experiences of a ceasefire monitor for the African Union while he was in Dar Fur. There are a lot of explicit pictures in this film taken from the ground and the air, because that was the job of the monitor. He was there to take pictures, and was not allowed to interfere in any way.
There is a lot of frustration expressed in the film on the part of the observer. He was in the army before he had this job and didn't like being in the situation and not be able to help. There is a point where he talks about how he is sitting in the same place on the helicopter as he did when he was a gunner, but there is no gun. He wants to stop what is going on and he feels like having a half dozen gunships would be all that they would need to end the conflict.
I think that the hardest part of the film to watch is a part where the observation chopper watches the government military stand by as a whole village is killed and burned. The government troops even tell the observers to just leave. There are obvious tracks on the ground from where the Janjawid had come and talked with the military group just a few minutes before.
There is also a good message about what we can do here in the U.S to try to stop this genocide from continuing. There is a large section of the film concerning activism and work with Save Darfur. Also since this film came out the president of the Sudan has been indited for war crimes including genicide, this makes it so that he is pretty much stuck in Sudan because most countries have signed a UN treaty against Genocide. Unfortunately that treaty has yet to be effective in the prevention of genocide.
Here is a link the website for the movie if you want to learn more about the film, if you want to watch it you can get it from netflix or buy it for about $15: http://www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com/
the following is something that happen because they are tired of being treated like animals, by police corruption unjust actions such as being racially profiled, harassed, and know and seeing four of three officers guilty of a crime which was caught on tape and they were acquitted as a result, and not having faith in the Judaical system.
Scene from American History X, within this scene it is a very heated debate about how Rodney King was attacked by police officers, while having dinner. Son played by Edward Norton who simulates a racial skin head group member
The aftermath of the Police trail were the police were proven not guilty which sparked the LA riots, listen to the news reporter, reporting the story and the language they are using to describe the scenes going on... some of the graphics are hard to see but it is a reality of what happened in 1992 in Los Angeles, California.
Earlier this week I watched Hotel Rwanda for the first time. I knew about the genocide there previously but I didn't knew as much about the differences between the two groups involved. Here is a clip that explains the difference.
After watching this and realizing that the differentiation between the groups was completely artificial I wondered how somthing like this could happen. Most of the killings in this genocide were carried out with machetes, a very personal way to attack someone. How could the artificial in and out groups become so salient that they allowed people to commit such violent acts? Do you think something like this could have happened if there had not been artificial groups created by the colonials?
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