Most of us know about the three month oil spill into the gulf. While it is the largest oil spills, people are attacking BP and hurting the owners of the independent stores. There's even a "like" page on facebook that "Boycott BP" has over 650,00 "fans".
This relates to True Notebooks a lot because people get a stereotype that everyone in prison, or a juvenille hall , are bad people. And just because of the stereotype that is fed to people, they think that they don't need help, and that they're never going to change. In True Notebooks you get to see another side of the men that are incarcerated. They're trying to learn, and they pray everyday that they can get out and start a new life. They're not benefitting from the negative thoughts that people perceive. Like the BP issue, the people that boycott BP have no idea that what they're doing isn't "helping" the way they think it is. I think that if people were to try and educate themselves more about issues the world faced, then the other end wouldn't be suffering for nonsense reasons.
What do you think contributes to this negative representation of both groups? Is this related to media? And, can we fully blame media or antoher form of representation or do these "stereotypes" hold any nugget of truth?
ReplyDeleteI think this is a good point to bring up--that there are smaller issues within these large generalizations--however, the relationship between the two ideas is not fully fleshed out. Work a little more to explain to us how you are seeing people "hurt" by these generalizations and how you are seeing issues of victimization and power struggles.