In Kuma’s
article on cultural stereotypes, stereotypes of Asians are talked about. The author talks about how people from so
many different countries and cultures are all thrown into this category of “Asian”. This made me think a lot about how a lot of
people will refer to people of Latin decent as “Spanish”. They say things to me like,”oh, you’re Spanish!”. I always reply,”no, I’m Mexican”, and they
say that it’s the same thing. This
drives me nuts. It is not the same
thing. People from Spain are from an entirely
different continent. Although there may
be Spanish influence in Mexico, Mexican and Spanish are not the same
thing. Maybe I am being a little picky
or I shouldn’t let it bother me so much, but I don’t like how people just throw
around people’s heritage and treat it so carelessly. I was also surprised to see the three
stereotypes about Asians. I was
surprised because I wouldn’t have guessed that those would be the stereotypes
people would come up with about Asians.
It is absolutely not okay for teachers to make or even take into
consideration these stereotypes. One
thing that is very important to me as a teacher of a diverse population of
students is that teachers do not make generalizations or stereotypes and really
get to know their students on a personal level.
I was also
intrigued by Kubata’s discussion on the social construction of race and how we
should question whether the term race should be used as a category for
scholarly investigation and discussion.
This really intrigued me and got me thinking about the term race. There are so many different combinations of
race and people are made up of so many different things. So, should we be using the term race? Are we reinforcing these socially constructed
definitions of race? What is that
teaching people? Could this lead to
racism? I’m not really sure what to
think about this but it has really got me thinking. Part of me thinks that it is a historical
term and that it might be time to steer away from the word race.
No comments:
Post a Comment