After a long discussion with my friends last night, we were toying with the idea of talking about and explaining racism, prejudice, and discrimination.
It hit me suddenly: why not take historical examples and put it into a modern context?
Historically, blacks, gays, and women have all been discriminated, prejudiced, and racially ostracized from society. In this day and age, merely hinting at someone’s sexual orientation is liable for lost jobs.
Yet, people still complain about it and in schools, kids see the prejudice and cannot comprehend it as they didn’t experience it first. In this, I will be using aliens, weeaboos, and furries to bring modern examples of ostracized/mocked societies to light. Merely, I would like input, feedback, or possible source suggestions to create this.
TL; DR: Toying around with using furries, aliens, and weebs as means to explain racism, discrimination, and prejudice.
I would think it’s hard to draw parallels between discrimination based on chosen social groupings and discrimination based on innate human qualities.
The parallels and qualities drawn are made more around the actual reaction from society. In the modern-day, the greatest judgements that have been made are given about the choices about a person. In this anti-bullying culture, kids aren’t making fun of one another because solely off of their appearance. Rather, the paper is meant to put it in terms that which they would understand. As material culture rises, so too will the aggression be met by those who choose to voluntarily deviate from the norm.
FYI the Stanford Prison Experiment, Third Wave Experiment, Elliott experiment, conformity experiments and their ilk have already been done long ago and are found in any beginning psychology textbook. Furthermore, you couldn’t (and shouldn’t) get that sort of thing past the ethics committee these days. Therefore, this may not be a fruitful line of research to pursue.
What exactly are you trying to create? Is it a random undergrad paper? High school? Grad thesis? Maybe this is the kind of thing that would be better explored via fictionalization (like the young adult novel/movie Divergent)? It’s the sort of topic that might make sense in a basic sociology or writing class, but IMHO it’s hard to take it seriously beyond that.
Gays, blacks, and women are not just targets of historical discrimination. There’s no need to metaphorize them into other subcultures (which, again, are totally different when they’re a chosen thing vs something you’re born with). They still experience very common discrimination on a daily basis, and you’re not doing kids any favors by painting this as a long-gone historical oddity. It’s still with us. And the kinds of discrimination that threaten weeaboos, furries, etc. (light mockery) are totally different from the systematic oppression that gays, blacks, and women have been subjected to, from rapes to lynchings to genocide to the legalized and normalized stripping of basic human rights. A gay black women can’t just take off her costume and turn off the anime and suddenly be free of discrimination. (And I don’t know what an alien is, unless you mean immigrants…)
The “privilege line” is a common exercise used to address the reality of this situation without downplaying its seriousness:
“Historic, systemic discrimination against black people and women can be understood by observing the bullying that furries are subjected to today” doesn’t seem like it would fly.
Are you seriously suggesting that blacks, gay sand women are no longer discriminated against? There may be laws against racial and gender discrimination, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone. And discrimination of gays is still legal in many US states.
I don’t know about you, but I rarely hear of bigotry towards gay sand women.
(OP, you might want to look into the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment.)
If you’re into comics, pretty much all of the Marvel storylines spinning off from the Mutant Registration Act might make decent analogies…
Sand people have a hard life irrespective of sexual orientation. Homosexuality certainly doesn’t help.
[Moderating]
I don’t think I see a factual question here, but it’ll probably do well in IMHO. Moving.
Do you have data? Are you planning to do a study? Mine data from other studies?
If not all you have are opinions and you might be able to sell it as an op-ed or something, but not in a research journal. Or a respectable one anyway.
If you were famous in the field you might get an editorial in a research journal, but I’m guessing you’re not.
And, how can one tell gender under all of those robes?
Aliens? The original Star Trek already did it in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. Also Alien Nation, the movie and the series.
Looks like taking a nap will REALLY change perspective.
For one, sand people are people too. Sandman doesn’t deserve discrimination from Spiderman.
For two, I get the logistics of avoiding research articles in particular yet I realize too that most schools (especially the one I went to) outright AVOIDS using anything but these articles. Now I am not famous (in my own mind at least) so getting an article published will likely be for naught. Yet, I still feel that such an allegory could be made in another forum more commonplace: youtube, facebook, or Instagram. I have not, do not nor will I ever say that such injustices against gay, black, and female people are completely gone but I will justify that such acts of hatred have since decreased significantly since their respective upstarts (around the 1960s for blacks, 1980s for women, and 2000s/2010s for gays). Each suffered greatly, whether through physical, mental, or emotional abuse, both perceived and made. I wish that they could understand and connect on another format that they are currently aware of in the meantime that CANNOT be as simple as race, sexual orientation, and gender as they understand and accept each wholeheartedly in a manner unmatched by prior generations. If they could see these deviant groups and have divergent opinions, maybe they could possibly speak out against the prejudice while being informed. Not everything has to be on the surface, in fact, the Sneeches by Dr. Suess is a perfect example. With this in mind, the goal is to educate by association.
Thank you all and I’m going to bed because finals are actual hell.
Are you still in college? I assume so since giving finals is a lot less hellish than taking them. (Grading them, on the other hand …)
If you go to grad school you will soon learn how to write a paper and get feedback on it. You haven’t expressed a clear hypothesis here (which doesn’t mean you don’t have one) but you might see what data you can find on instances of discrimination involving the groups you mentioned. I suspect a problem would be is that the measurements will be inconsistent across studies across time.
Writing the paper is relatively easy. Collecting the data and doing experiments is difficult, one might say hellish.
But I admire your ambition. If you find research fun, grad school will be fun also.
By having gender-differentiating robes, of course.
We went from “idea for research paper” to “maybe imma share this on Instagram.”
Yep, freshman year too! I am familiar with the writing process and I think I may have been a bit misguided with my approach on this topic but I am glad your here to aid the cause!
Umm - you think that’s when discrimination against those groups started? You might want to educate yourself on the subject…