What I thought was most interesting while reading Brock's study on The Wire and Freakonomics that the people who probably wrote on there were white. It was interesting that people started to identify with their race. When they wrote no the website they declared what race they were and sometimes their gender. It shows that we are not past the issue of race and we do not live in a post race society. This is because there is still this thought that education only is for the white and that people who are interested in the site, Freakonomics, are only white people. People of other races are not educated and do not care about such topics. In order for people of other races to be noticed they have to say what kind of race they are.
What else was interesting with this study was that people thought of white thugs as upper class and black thugs as low class. When people got the notion of white thugs it was mostly thoughts of the 20s. What people do not realize today that thugs can come from all different kinds of races. We can see thugs in the upper class committing crimes on Wall Street or thugs in any other neighborhoods. To be a thug a person does not have to look a certain way or be from a certain area. This is how racial stereotypes are made and we form our schemas. What we see in the news we get this perception of what we think a thug is and it is embedded in our minds whenever we see another person look and act like that person on the news they are thugs.
Do you think people still identify with their race to prove a point that just because they look a certain way does not mean that they are not educated? Do you think a person who thinks a thug looks a certain way will ever change or that the news will keep enforcing that stereotype of a typical thug?
Everyone has an image in his or her heads of what a stereotypical thug looks like which unfortunately is a black man and that is because we are only embedded with images of black men as criminals. The news is responsible for the images we see and as long as we see black men portrayed as criminals, black men will always be associated with the thug stereotype. In regards to your question about why people identify with their race when proving a point, I think in certain situations stating your race justifies your positions and can make what you say valid. When you identify your race this is also a way for people to relate to you and your experiences or to see how you differ in opinion.
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