Native Americans

1. For this assignment I decided to focus on race. The first article is Culturally Appropriating Native Americans: A “Hands-on Approach to History”. The tile of the report by Gwen is disturbing because it denotes a racist approach to it by making native Americas become “appropriate”. The book is not a guide for Native Americans to preserve their culture, rather it is a book to guide white kids how to mimic and play natives.
The information in the book is vague regarding Native American culture and the purpose of describing different aspects such as tattooing, clothing, and hats are so that children create stereotypes about Native Americans and then copy the styles in this crafts book. A stereotype is an oversimplifies generalization by which we attribute certain traits or characteristics to a group without regard to individual difference, and this is exactly what this book aims to do. When a child sees a person with a bow and arrow, he or she will immediately believe this person is a Native American.
The author of the article states that “throughout the book, only the past tense is used, as though Native Americans are relics of the past, no longer in existence (or at least, no longer interesting).” Overall the book Romanticizes Native Americans as courageous, noble, but ultimately tragic figures of the past, this is the last stage of discrimination extermination. At least in this book extermination is seen by creating Native Americans “nonexistent” and figures of the past no longer alive. Examples of this discrimination are seen all around, for example when aboriginals put “stage shows” that tourist pay to go and watch, in Hawaii when people go to watch hula dancers, books that have a “how-to” do or play traditions of other cultures. Here is the link; http://contexts.org/socimages/2010/04/05/culturally-appropriating-native-americans-a-hands-on-approach-to-history/.
2. This article again is by Gwen it’s called IMAGES OF NATIVE AMERICANS. It points out that Indian names follow the pattern of ‘Present-Tense Singular Verb + with + Noun’” idea. Indian names are always funny and weird and show what the person does, or so do most people think. In addition, the article has a variety of different t-shirts people wear to Romanticizes Native American’s love for nature.
This article does not particularly show a pattern of discrimination but rather a pattern of prejudice, because it is an attitudinal system. In addition it is not negative but positive. From a cognitive level of prejudice it could be said that “native American are nature lovers and have funny names”.
Examples of this are abundant because it’s simple stereotyping, when people think that Chinese speak a certain way “me good”, “you like not” and so on, there is even a website to make your name Hawaiian http://hawaiiannames.hisurf.com/. Here is the link; http://contexts.org/socimages/2008/11/09/images-of-native-americans/
3. This article by Lisa “The Neutral And The Marked: A Primer For Your Kids”, it shows a variety of toys that are gear to make children be socially aware and expand their horizons. They have set of families of different races, for example the African American family has the mom and dad, two children, dog and basketball. The Asian family has mom, dad, two children and the dad is holding a camera. The Caucasian family has medical instruments as to show they have a good profession.
Overall the toys are not discriminatory, they could have been made even harsher assumptions on the races, but the problem comes with the instructions. The instructions say that “Children can imagine and tell stories about Red Indians, helping to stimulate their imagination and expanding their horizon.”, I feel there was no need to say “Red”, the article does not put the instructions about the other races, I wonder if they are too prejudice. The toys could lead children to develop socialization process, in which individuals acquire the values, attitudes, beliefs and perceptions of their cultures including religion, nationality, and social class based on these toys.
A clear example of this type of prejudice is experienced by many girls when they play with Barbie’s, as they often feel ugly and different because they don’t have blue eyes and blonde hair and although these toys are aiming at reducing segregation, perhaps they will have a positive outcome in future less discriminatory societies. Here is the link; http://contexts.org/socimages/2008/04/01/the-neutral-and-the-marked-a-primer-for-your-kids/