Okay, so maybe the title is a bit melodramatic, but a few fond childhood memories did take a bit of a beating today. My family and I went to the Shedd Aquarium with our foreign exchange student, because we could not in good conscience let her leave Chicago without experiencing the museums.
My excitement at reliving some of the magic that I remembered from my visits to the aquarium when I was younger diminished slightly as soon as the dolphin show, now known as "Fantasea" began. I remembered a pretty cool display of dolphins doing tricks and trainers explaining a few things about the animals. What we got this time was a flashy, dumbed-down show with little actual substance. They removed every remotely educational aspect from the script and replaced them with actors dressed up in white jumpsuits, which were supposed to look like beluga whales, I guess.
I also felt like a was being brainwashed the entire time, because they kept flashing their logo (see picture) and mentioning that they are sponsored by ComEd (which is another issue altogether).
Maybe somewhere along the line the director of the program decided that they needed to draw in a younger audience and, in an effort to make everything more kid-friendly, made the show into something fit for Cartoon Network rather than the Discovery Channel. My own qualms about preserving my youth aside, I think that the revisions made to the show demonstrate a real lack of faith in today's young people. We have begun to assume that no child can be interested in learning without adults dumbing it down and making it fun and colorful for them. This is so wrong. It is quite limiting on creativity, since it gives kids an already-packaged story behind the show, rather than letting them absorb it in their own way.
Whatever happened to learning for learning's sake? If kids cannot appreciate the world as it is now, instead of as some fake construction created by a corporate sponsor, how will they ever? Do you think this kind of thing is helpful or harmful to children?
In discussing Huck Finn during class, we talked about the life advice that Huck gives and receives throughout the novel. He seems to take in the opinions and views of everyone else, while never actually processing it or thinking for himself. From an outsider's perspective, this is pretty easily recognizable. However, I thought about it a little more and realized that this directly applies to my own life.
There are little "helpful quotes" everywhere, all telling me how to live my life correctly. They cover the Trevian Tracker (the little school assignment notebook) and they plaster the walls of the hallway. When I was in sixth grade I read the "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" quote by Confucius. Not gonna lie, it got pretty old after the first fifty times.
Personally, I think that getting life advice crammed into your ears is not helpful at all. In fact, it is actually harmful to a person's morality. If an institution wants to impress students with some sort of life lesson, they have to find a more effective way of doing so.
The reason why sayings like this are not a good idea is the same reason why we try to discover knowledge rather than receive it in class. If one is simply told something, the message often does not stick. But, it they truly learn it for themselves, it will be ingrained in their minds for a lifetime.
It is wrong to shove quotes like this at young children and to tell them that they have to live by them to have a successful and moral life. It is not true and it is far oversimplifying ethics. If we cannot honestly trust kids to discover their own moral fibers, then out society is pretty far gone. I believe that ethics should be discussed and discovered, but never wraped up neatly in cute little wall posters. Thoughts?
Today in class we examined an article by Peggy McIntosh called "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack". It was about the ways that our society favors people who are white over people of color, whether or not it is intentional and purposefully racist.
The article consists of a lost of fifty different examples of this phenomenon, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. That aside, number 46, which I do agree with really caught my attention: "46. I can chose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more or less match my skin."
I think that the reason why this particular example stuck out to me is because it is something that I take for granted. Of course a flesh-colored band-aid would match my skin color. I also have never really considered the matching a bit deal. Sometimes I even wear blue band-aids with little glow-in-the-dark Spongebobs on them. But the practical applications of a band-aid's color are not really in question here.
The real issue is in the assumptions that our society makes based on race and color of skin. We like to call ourselves a "post-racial-America", but even if direct hate crimes and racial profiling have come to an end, all of these little things, like white band-aids add up to a very uneven society. I think that these small, seemingly unintentional and harmless discrepancies are often more damaging to race relations than the larger, deliberate examples of racism.
My reasoning is twofold. First of all, I explore the phenomenon of right-handed scissors. Obviously, no one hates left-handed people for being left-handed, yet the average lifespan is shorter for these few. Why? Many things, like scissors, are built for people who are righties. This can make life more dangerous for the minority of people who are not. This is similar to the band-aid story. Small things can add up very quickly.
The second argument is that when racism takes such a subtle form, it becomes ingrained in society without people noticing it. If we accept these things as normal, we are accepting that one group of people should live with more privilege than another group. Things are overlooked that should not be.
After reading this article, I think that I have already become more aware of this sort of racial bias in my personal experience.
Like most Americans, I spent this evening sitting around the TV with family and friends, eating guacamole and watching the Superbowl. As much as the football game itself fascinates me, I have always been intrigued by the commercials. Several years ago, I started keeping track of the different categories of ads. For example, a few of the most common types from this year were TV shows, cars, and beer.
Out of the 113 commercials that aired between the kickoff and the end of the game, 30 were for CBS shows. But the ads that I found the most interesting were far from the most common. They were the two godaddy.com commercials, featuring the "Go Daddy Girl".
Both the ads depicted a woman being recognized as the Go Daddy Girl. Another woman in the ad then asked if she was "go daddy material". Then she ripped the front of her shirt open, and the commercial ended, directing viewers to visit the Go Daddy website if they wanted to see more.
My question hardly even needs to be stated. Are these commercials inappropriate? I would say yes. The Superbowl has been branded as a family show ever since the Justin Timberlake/Janet Jackson fiasco a few years ago. In the years following their "wardrobe malfunction", CBS has tried to make the even more family-friendly by having much older bands play the halftime show. So why ruin the efforts with such sexist and provocative ads? The network chose to deny other ads on the grounds that they were not in keeping with the station's values. Why on earth did they not deny this one too? I am all for the funny ads, but this one made me feel more like I was about to see pornography.
If we keep portraying women as sex symbols in media, true equality can never be achieved. C'mon, CBS.
