Sunday, March 4, 2012
New Black Man by Neal
In this chapter, Neal
talks about the crisis of black men in America and the stereotypes that exist in
society. Neal argues that music,
television and etc demonstrate black men as a failure. He said “it was perhaps
easy to isolate Tupac Shakurs, Allen Iverson, “pookies” and Nushawn Williams of
the world” and make them the reason behind of this failure. As an example Neal points
out Nushawn Williams who infected a number
of young women and girls with HIV. Furthermore, Neal talks about the black men of
upper-class which were known by “the new talented tenth” and the lower-class
ones which were “the hip-hop thug”. I agree that some mistakes might have
really bad consequences and the damage sometimes may be irrecoverable, but at the
same time I think there are different types of stereotypes in today’s society
and we can’t judge everyone based on a mistake that some few people did in the
past.
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I agree that people should not apply the racial stereotypes of a particular racial group to an individual person because often times those stereotypes do not hold true among individuals. However, I think it is difficult for some people to let go of the past and keep an open mind when it comes to some racial profilings. For example, a person who has a family member who died or survived the Holocaust may hate all Germans forever - even though that person may meet someone of German decent who had nothing to do with the Holocaust - that racial profile may be permanent.
ReplyDeleteI definitely see Samantha's point. Unfortunately, we often have subconscious or even conscious but uncontrollable reactions when faced with something that brings up negative memories for us. I believe that it is important to recognize our generalized or skewed reaction, when we do have it, and to try to combat it with logic and an open mind. It is hard to get rid of old prejudices but possible, if we can recognize our own stereotyping of others for whatever reason.
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