Cultural Appropriation

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Social injustices are a plague upon our society. Many of the social justice problems that we have talked about in the course Diversity and Multicultural Education, I have seen with my own eyes. From blatant racism to hidden bias, prejudices towards minority groups are not a thing of the past and are very much present in today’s society. Members of minority groups often fall victim to slurs from the ignorant. Cultural appropriation is also a major conflict facing the masses, which is caused by minority group members being underrepresented in media and the curriculum. This often leads to biases that are learned from society. Many individuals elect to stay quiet to avoid any conflict, but not speaking out to end the injustice is only adding …show more content…

I have witnessed cultural appropriation first hand from my peers. I have seen individuals dressed in Blackface in older pictures and others dressed up as Native Americans in more recent times. I have always known that this behavior was wrong and should not be considered acceptable in modern society. It is the twenty-first century and I felt that people should be more sensitive to those around them. While it is generally accepted that Blackface costumes are completely wrong, some individuals still tend to elect to have a costume using Blackface. Generally, these individuals suffer from a backlash from people in person and on social media, but what about the people who choose to dress up as American Indians? These instances of cultural appropriation are often just accepted by society, but it is not acceptable to dress up as a culture. Native Americans still exist today. They are not some caricature representation from the past and are real people and a real culture. We generally frown upon individuals dressing up in Blackface or Whiteface, so dressing up as Native Americans should not be accepted either. In the future, I will remind students and those around me of how dressing up as a culture is not acceptable in an aim to end the normalization of this practice in …show more content…

I have always like to believe that I had no bias towards any individuals of any group. My parents raised me to treat everyone equally and that everyone is equal and this is what I truly believe. Through studying the different ways bias occurs, I was forced to take a long hard look at myself and identify the hidden biases that I had that I had been denying throughout my life. I had never acted on my biases, but I am now aware that they are there. For instance, I found myself expecting students of a certain ethnicity to be less behaved and slack off more than others. These biases were formed by the stereotypes that society has popularized for various ethnicities, cultures, and other minority group members. I had allowed myself to subconsciously acknowledge these stereotypes for specific students. This bias is often the reason behind larger scale issues in schools such as the prison pipeline. Administrators view schools with large numbers of African American students in the inner city as having a high chance of behavior issues. In an effort to prevent any behavior issues, administrators create a very strict prison-like environment. Treating students as prisoners will cause them to think that they are and this in turn will lead to them acting out and causing problems in the future and eventually to becoming prisoners. This school to prison pipeline is just

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