In reading the Blindspot reading for next class, the section titled “The Cost of the Stereotype That American = White” stood out to me the most. Just yesterday, I saw a tweet from Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in which she listed characteristics about herself such as “Hijab, Muslim, Black, Foreign Born…” The point of the tweet was to point out xenophobia that she has come face-to-face with since 2016. In a response to the tweet, Senator Ted Cruz questioned why she had not mentioned “American” in her list attributes. He claimed that it was due to the supposed negative connotation with word “American” that he believes exists currently among liberals. However, in response to Cruz, Joshua Collins (a man running for Congress in Washington) remarked that “American” did not need to be on the list because it is implied since Omar is a congresswoman. He goes on to state, “[Omar’s] not required to call herself American in every tweet just because she’s not white.” <\/p>\n
The implicit bias of American = White makes it so POC in the United States are constantly forced to prove their citizenship status while white people are able to exist within this country without having their citizenship status questioned. In a personal example, I have a friend from high school that is an immigrant from Korea. Her parents are naturalized citizens and are registered to vote. However, my friend told me that they never choose to vote and dislike interacting with people that are not Korean because they worry about their citizenship status being questioned. Meanwhile, my paternal grandpa is an immigrant from Canada. Although he has lived in the United States for roughly 60 years, he has never become a US citizen. However, he has not experienced the same questioning of his legal status as my friend’s parents have. People just assume that he is an American citizen because he is white. He often makes jokes about how people will be talking to him, assume that he is American, and then he will mention that he is not a citizen and the person he is talking to will be shocked. <\/p>\n
This stereotype is dangerous because, like in the reading, the implicit bias can lead to people being treated as though they do not belong. Which, leads to the greater consequences of people loosing their job and being framed for crimes that they did not commit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In reading the Blindspot reading for next class, the section titled “The Cost of the Stereotype That American = White” stood out to me the most. Just yesterday, I saw a tweet from Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in which she listed characteristics about herself such as “Hijab, Muslim, Black, Foreign Born…” The point of the tweet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4684,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4684"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}