Stereotype and Prejudice

During class, we watched this Youtube video that portrayed how often these criminal suspects are being described as “black male or African American male” in the news media. I don’t find this strange because almost every crime alert that I heard has something to do with a black male suspect. Connecting to our Thursday’s activity about Trayvon Martin, who was shot to death by, a neighborhood watcher, George Zimmerman because he was wearing a dark color hoodie. After reading about this tragic news, I was annoyed by the stereotypes that Zimmerman holds. At the same time, it makes me to worry about wearing a dark color hoodie out at night in the future. Because of these stereotypical issues that keep happening in our society and the way that the media portrayed each news report, we are mostly likely to become prejudice and being stereotypical on some race problems, which studies have shown proven results. For example, in the article (Caucasian Viewer’s Memory of Black and White Criminal Suspects in the News) by Mary Beth Oliver, the experiment was conducted to examine the memories that the Caucasian viewers have on Black and White Criminal Suspects in the news. The results have shown from this study that people identified black suspects as the murderer even though the white suspect is actually the murderer. With that being said, the concept of social cognition in the article is important to explain why we often identified black male as the criminal suspect even when he/she is not (Entman, 1992). Social cognition is a schematic process that causes a person to identify someone based on what they already know. Therefore, it is not a surprise to say that the black suspect is the actual criminal.