Stereotypes: Race and People

Can everything said these days be believed? Today’s social media is highly affected by both language and how a message is sent whilst using the language. There are a handful of different aspects that affect social media as a whole; popular culture, stereotypes, textual bias and language presented in speeches and campaigns. Language can be used to explain a message but how the language is used in a context can define whether or not the message is portrayed clearly or if it is portrayed poorly. What you are about to hear may affect how you interpret language used by today’s media as well as today’s society. If you don’t know what it is let me explain for a bit:
Stereotyping is the act of presenting a person or group in a certain way, through simplified and biased media, for example all asians like rice. This phrase states that the whole asian population, wherever in the world they may be, like rice. For an asian like myself I would think: “ oh that isn’t exactly true since asian are also people who have different like and dislikes”. Now this is where stereotyping causes harm between different ethnic groups, for example the the phrase; “all black people steal things”. This phrase clearly states that all African and African American people like to steal things and this phrase was made up because of the fact that maybe once or twice in history a man dressed in black or an African American or African man was accused of stealing something therefore this stereotype is supposedly applicable towards the whole black population around the world. As one might see stereotyping can cause great disputes between different ethnicities as well as break ties between specific ones. Stereotyping is very popular social media ( tv shows, news, internet, etc.). How the news dictates a certain story about an ethnic can in turn either make create trust between people or start wars between them. For example, not everyone who is Muslim wants to bomb gigantic pieces of architecture but due to certain events, such as the bombing of the twin towers of the world trade center on September 11, 2011, people have come to believe that all Muslims have bad intentions. How we interpret the news may affect social relations between the people we know.

What have I learned from the constant language change and all these messages from different cultures, world leaders, and speeches? Well one thing is that: * What we say always has a hidden meaning. There is never a message without a hidden meaning to itself.

* Secondly, people will never forget what you will say, meaning you must be very careful with the words you use and in what manner you say your message because it can be misunderstood.

* Finally, always remember that the freedom of speech does not mean that one is free to say whatever they please but to convey their opinions by talking to one another.

* Kiko Garcia

Comments:
XXkikomysterXX says:
I totally I agree with what you’re saying, I mean people shouldn’t be judge from what has been stereotyped against them. I mean I’m asian, but I don’t like rice that much. I have had a stranger come up to me one time and asked me if I knew kung-fu or any kind of martial art, I told him that I didn’t and he just simply said: “well I thought all Asians were good at some kind of martial art”. This insulted me a bit in the sense that some stereotypes make other people believe that Asians are being expected of something great.

Kikoman345 says:
Tss you guys are a bunch of little girls! Why would you take something like “oh you should be good at maths” so seriously, I mean I’m asian I’m not good at math but I don’t complain about what other people think about me. I only think about myself and what would benefit me.

Kikodaman says:
Kikoman345, I kinda I agree with you in the sense of self importance but at the same time it’s also quite good to understand why stereotyping starts in the first place, it’s because of other people from another ethnicities don’t know the culture other than their own. I see the importance in this and I believe that if people from other ethnicities would be more open to other cultures they would come to understand the values and morals of that certain ethnic group.

Kiko Garcia:
Thank you guys for sharing your thoughts, a bit odd how we all have almost the same name though, but anyway I agree with you all. I understand that everyone is a different person but some people can’t be forced into understanding another culture just because of one certain stereotype but for other people they don’t really mind finding out about a new culture to them, which I find very good. Yet, as kikodaman said it is also important that the individual that are being stereotype only think about the good stereotypes that they hear, but at the same time being an open person would never hurt anyone at all.

Rationale:
I wanted to show my knowledge in stereotyping but be able to explain it in a more popular way for today’s culture, therefore I thought about writing a blog entry. In this entry I explain what stereotyping is and how it affects people, as seen in the “comments”. I thought about how news gets spread around us quite fast and then I thought why, the answer was the internet. The internet is used very frequently for communication, work, games, etc. but most importantly to spread news. My aim for this blog entry was to enlighten those who stereotype other people for their skin color, accent or even their ethnicity, and those who are less informed today are the young teenagers. These teenagers spend a handful of time on social media sites such as facebook, twitter, etc. so I thought writing a blog entry would make them understand more about stereotyping and its consequences.