“We are a product of our own upbringing.” Last class we spent time talking about how an individual’s surroundings and upbringings can have major influence over their perspective and thus, their identity. Does that mean that we are all subjectively biased towards things such as race? Yes, I think so. Although race is a construct, it is seen everywhere, which further makes it a strong construct within the establishment of our own society. However, as of right now, race is a needed construct. Not in the sense that racism is needed, and that the individual distinction of race is relevant towards greater things, however, as long as the problem of racism exists, the construct of race needs to exist. To have racism, but to be “color blind” is to be subjecting the individual self to ignorance towards the problem of racism altogether. Being “color blind” is like turning heads away from racism altogether. Does racism still exist? Does racial prejudice still exist? To be “color blind” creates an aura of a hero complex, does it ‘fix’ racism if you, yourself, are “color blind”? I believe that color blindness is a form of performative activism, or in other words, performing the act of a movement for a beneficial gain; was anything benefitted by one person being color blind? Moving on, performative activism is prevalent across media outlets, especially instagram. Media, is said to be home of sites meant to engage, represent, and communalize race. However, media is also an outlet where an individual can mold a ‘fake identity’ (reference identity keywords.) The problem of performative activism in social media is that someone can post a “Share for BLM” and then do nothing afterwards. It’s almost as if taking 1 second to share a post promoting a movement is enough to help ‘solve’ what that movement is fighting for. It’s just not enough, but continuously, posts are shared promoting movements, however, for the majority of time, these movements don’t even benefit from the sharing of the posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“We are a product of our own upbringing.” Last class we spent time talking about how an individual’s surroundings and upbringings can have major influence over their perspective and thus, their identity. Does that mean that we are all subjectively biased towards things such as race? Yes, I think so. Although race is a construct, it is seen everywhere, which… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5390,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[785],"tags":[68173,195088,785],"class_list":["post-815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race","tag-movements","tag-performative-activism","tag-race"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5390"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":816,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions\/816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/mci-fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}