Uninformed Citizen

As I have come to learn, I am a very uninformed citizen.  I am not a consumer of news.  I don't read the newspaper, either local or national.  The only time I have the news channel on is when there is a football game on to watch.  The only "news" I consume is from my social media feeds.  The two main social media sites that I get news from are Facebook and Tumblr.  A lot of my friends on Facebook are very politically opinionated, and most of what they post is incredibly biased.  The same thing is true for the "news" I get from Tumblr.  The people on Tumblr are also very biased, so I can't trust everything I read on there.

I was shown a list of current events and was asked to rank them in order of what I thought was most important at this point in time.  My list went police brutality, because of the recent happenings in Ferguson; climate change, because I saw a thing about a huge march that went on in New York City; gay marriage; terrorism; abortion rights; poverty; health care;  and then unemployment.

After looking at various websites, I found out just how little I know about current events.  The actual list of important things that were happening was terrorism, which showed  up as the headline of every online news source I saw; ebola, Hillary Clinton, and then climate change.  I didn't even know that Hillary Clinton was in the news recently.  I had heard of some cases of people dying in Africa from ebola and that the CDC had allowed some doctors to re-enter the states that tested positive for ebola.  All of which may not be true, it's just what I seem to remember about it.  I have heard about ISIS in the current events, but all that I had heard was that they had captured and executed some reporters.  They might not have even been reporters, it's also just what I seem to remember.  I had no idea that the US was intervening over there.

This was an interesting exercise for me to do.  I'm surprised at how little I know about, even though I don't make it a habit of following the news.

Accidental Racism

Growing up in Southern Colorado has done some interesting things to the way I think.  I went to school with quite a few Mexican people, and so my mind started to assume that everyone that wasn't white was Mexican.
When I came up to CSU, I had to quickly rework the way I thought.  This became apparent to me when I was making friends in the dorm building.  There was a boy that was in our group of friends.  He had dark skin and over time I found out that he spoke fluent Spanish. My mind automatically categorized him has Mexican.  After talking to him it was brought to my attention that he is actually half white, half black.
I had grown up with the only ethnic groups being white and Mexican that I had an automatic activation that made me assume that everyone with darker skin than mine was Mexican.  Automatic activation is something we are conditioned to think.  A great example of automatic activation comes from Tim Wise's documentary "White Like Me."  Tim Wise grew up going to a black school and is an equal rights activist.  Despite having a diverse and open minded background, Wise explains in his film that he boarded a plane one day and noticed that the two pilots were black.  His first thought was, "Are they qualified to do this?"  From being exposed to the media and thoughts of the dominant group all his life, Wise's first thought was that the pilots were not capable of flying a plane just because of their race.  Wise said that immediately after his first thought, his rational brain kicked in and remembered that in order to be a pilot one has to go through extensive training, and they would not have a job if they were unqualified for the position.

My Experience With "Othering"

With the 13th anniversary of the Twin Towers attacks passing last week, I'd like the focus of this blog post to be around the concept called "othering."  This term was somethinWg that new to me until recently, even though I have been surrounded by the effects of it almost all of my life.  The general act of othering is the act of comparing ourselves, usually on a cultural scale, to another group in order to distance ourselves from that other group.  It alienates another group of people in order to make our culture normal and right.  

My experience with othering dealt with the culture of the Middle East.  All my life I remember seeing videos and clips of radical groups from the Middle East on the news or in movies, fueled by the United State's conflict with them.  I became accustomed to this view of the Middle East, and although I did not realize it until recently, this viewpoint also instilled a subconscious level of fear of the Middle East.

I grew up in a small town with hardly any diversity, I had a huge culture shock when I moved away for college and found myself in the midst of many different cultures.  I was not used to living in such a diverse place, and it took me a little bit of time to move past my previous notions about certain cultures.

From the news and what I had gathered in my (little) knowledge of the Middle East, I knew them to be a violent culture.  I also knew them to be a culture that did not appreciate or respect women.  These thoughts were never something that was explicitly taught to me, but rather they were my own opinions that I had formed based on the knowledge I had.  I have always thought of myself as an open minded person, so the narrow view I had of Middle Eastern people was not something I was proud of.  

  With these prior opinions in mind, I was hesitant to reach out and make friends with the Middle Eastern students.  It took a visit from some old friends in high school to get me to look beyond what I thought I knew and find out first hand how they were.  My friends are avid hookah smokers, so we ended up at a local hookah place.  There happened to be quite a few Middle Eastern men there as well, and our groups ended up hanging out together and talking.  Much to my surprise, the Middle Eastern men were so kind to me.  They even stuck up for me when my friends playfully picked on me.   They also told my friends not to curse in front of my because it was disrespectful.  They joked with me and laughed with me and had conversations with me and I was so very wrong about any previous thought I had about people from the Middle East.  

Going back to the term othering, I am so disappointed to think about how many other people had the same thoughts that I did based on how the Middle Eastern people are portrayed here in the US.  It saddens me to think that an entire group of people is defined solely on the US's conflict with them.

Re-Watching Childhood Cartoons

Have you recently re-watched some cartoons or movies from your childhood?  Did you pick up on jokes and innuendos for the first time, even though you’ve seen the feature a hundred times?  Producers of children’s content throw these kind of things in all the time.

A great example of this is the show that aired on Cartoon Network called “Johnny Bravo.”  When I watched it as a child, I saw Johnny Bravo as a guy that just wanted a girlfriend.  He would ask out girl after girl and every time they would turn him down.  I liked the character Johnny Bravo as a kid because I saw him as a guy that never gave up, no matter how many people told him no.  The character also is shown to have a good relationship with his mom, which was a nice thing to see in a cartoon.  It taught me that I should be nice to my mom and that it wasn’t hard to have a good relationship with a parent. 

Another thing that Johnny Bravo taught me is that anyone can be friends, no matter what they look like.  In the show, Johnny Bravo is a big macho handsome blond man and his best friend is a dorky skinny little guy with glasses.  It showed me to look beyond the surface appearance of people and show interest in their character.

It has been at least ten years since I have watched the show and a lot has changed with the way I look at things.  I have a broader understanding of the world, and I am able to mindfully absorb media. 

The main thing that shocked me with “Johnny Bravo” was the way that Johnny was portrayed. In my adolescent mind, he was funny and desirable.  Watching the show now made me view him in a completely different light.  Johnny Bravo’s character is dumb.  Not lame dumb, like actually stupid.  This show made men out to be big muscly blond idiots that can’t think on their own.  Johnny Bravo is also very superficial; there was an entire episode where he needed more hair gel and couldn’t function without it. 

Another aspect of the show that I didn’t pick up on when I was little was how the women were portrayed.  All the women that were drawn for the show had incredibly small waists and big butts and big chests and big bouncy hair.  In one episode I recently watched, Johnny Bravo gets abducted by aliens and even the aliens looked that way, they were just colored green. 

Also something that was interesting to me was the fact that Johnny Bravo would not take no for an answer from the women he pursued.  The only way he stopped asking them out was when they beat him up in the classic cartoon fashion.  It was intriguing to see the makers of this cartoon saying that it’s okay to go after a woman, even after she says no.  In reality, a woman should not have to physically beat off someone that she is not interested in.

Despite catching things like in “Johnny Bravo,” I really enjoy having a blast from the past and watching things from my childhood.  It’s amazing what new things I pick up on.