Week 11 Post 2

The book addresses stereotypes and many Americans have an implicit bias against African Americans, detectable in slower reaction time when mentally processing pictures of African Americans as compared with photos of European Americans. I also read a study where people read a sentence with names that were more likely to be of people for African American and then reading names more likely to be of Caucasian. The study showed that when reading names associated with African American people were more likely to pick out the negative words than in Caucasian names. However I do not believe that people are racist because of this. Caucasians just identify with the pictures or European Americans more because that is their heritage and what they are more use to, this doesn’t make them racist. A stereotype threat is the possibility that one’s appearance or behavior will be misread to confirm another person’s oversimplified, prejudiced attitudes. I feel like stereotype threat isn’t really that prominent of an issue. I know boys and guys are supposedly supposed to do better in math and science than girls but that doesn’t make me nervous for a test or anything like that. I suck at math enough  to just get nervous that I’ll  be messing it  up for myself, not that I want to overcome a stereotype  or anything like that. I guess that proves the scientist theory that people will overcome the stereotype if they believe intelligence is plastic and not coming from genetic heritage.