Even though I am not a racist person by nature, I know that racism does exist in our world. It exists in our country. Even though there is no racism out in the open, but I know that many people still hold some racial thoughts against the various races that live in America. Racism was not considered a big problem a few decades ago, where people were openly racist against the people around them. But now, things are much better. The whole community as well as the local government is trying its best to alleviate such racial aggravations from our town. Racial discrimination and prejudice does not really exist in our community openly, but some reminiscence of prejudice still remain. An important thing to understand about racism is that even though it is a negative thing, it is a vital thing in our society as it allows us to 'see' the various differences between the people within our society. Not everyone is the same, and there are certain characteristics that can be attributed to the various races and classes of people. The most common of them is that of stereotyping.
Stereotyping is a phenomenon that occurs very frequently almost everywhere. This is when many of the people in our community tend to attach certain specific roles to the African Americans. There might not be outright racism against them, but many people tend to stereotype them as being thieves, criminals, or lazy. Perhaps this is because of the content in the media that is rampant in our society. The concerns of scholars and students of mass media and its artifacts have long been concerned with the notions pertaining to stereotyping. Barker (1989) appropriately states that “the search for 'stereotypes' in the media has become a small industry in its own right.” In addition, this industry has been much focused. Kitch (1997) also points out that a lot of the research on stereotyping borders on social activism, “naming stereotypes to call for a change in the real world” (p. 478). Such studies are mostly framed in order to provide the general public a view of the people of a certain culture in the way that a certain other group likes portrayed. It is mostly a more powerful group that takes control over the portrayal and thus perpetuates its own ideas upon the public of the other smaller, weaker, and thus the minority group; and these can have very harmful and potentially detrimental effects on the latter.
The previous generation believed that it was important to have racial differentiation amongst the people in a society. They argue that that the representation of the people in the world according to their respective classification is commendable and that it helps the world become a better place by clearly describing and defining the different kinds of human beings that exist in this world. This is a debatable issue since who is to be considered the authority in deciding the place of other humans? Also, certain biases also tend to creep in to a view of one group of people when they view the other group as being their rivals or even contemporaries. The groups who is power sometimes has no concern for those who do not have any power, at the same time, there are those who do have their concerns for the powerless. Thus it is important to understand the scholars' viewpoint by which they attempt to perceive, explain, and comprehend the effects of stereotyping that occurs so frequently today. Many of the peoples and the cultures of the world have been stereotyped today and this has caused a great deal of problems in the representations of the minority groups that reside in the US today. Why is it that everybody thinks that the black people are mostly criminals?
But I believe that the African Americans also have a role to play in determining their particular stereotype. James Baldwin wrote in 1953: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them” (pg 61). He said this specifically to infer upon the position of the black people all over the word. Baldwin felt a sense of alienation from his experiences in the world, for both his own self and the African culture as a whole. This presented the writer with a specific and unique sense of recognition that this was a problem was differently posed for the Black writer and the White writer. Baldwin had a peculiar African American sense of alienation, something similar to the concept of “double-consciousness” as depicted by W. E. B. Du Bois in the Souls of Black Folk. This means that to Baldwin, the American Negro holds “no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; t
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