I believe it is natural to determine people’s race and gender linguistically, but the wrong comes in when a person has pre-conceived notions about an individual’s nature based on their speech. Still, I don’t like the label linguistic profiling because it comes across that determining who a person is by the way they sound is wrong, and to me, it’s not. It is natural and common to recognize voices and it helps us learn more about each other. I use to have a huge problem with the “you talk white” or “you talk black” ordeal, but I realized that it is just an identifier. Like everything, there are different cases so proper-speaking people aren’t always white, but usually white (according to what you deem is or is not proper).
Like Rice in Linguistic Profiling and in the movie, I can usually tell whether my mother is talking to a white or black person on the phone, but I am not always right. I also do not assume because my mom is talking to a white person that the conversation will be different from if she was talking to a black person - I just recognize that the person is of or is not of a certain race. So my question is, what is linguistic profiling called if someone isn’t really profiling? Is it still linguistic profiling? If so, is the problem really linguistic profiling or stereotyping in general, and how wrong is stereotyping? If we don’t think negative of the people we’re stereotyping, isn’t stereotyping just putting people into categories? The Sociological definition of stereotyping according to Dictionary.com is “a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group: The cowboy and Indian are American stereotypes.” So therefore, don’t all of us fall into some category, whether or not we satisfy all the requirements for that specific group? The readings therefore confuse me for they somewhat but not always blame something that is done naturally and healthily. We stereotype be nature, not nurture and the unsupported and unreasonable thought of prejudice is a whole different thing. In the end, prejudice is just whether we get equal opportunity or not. Yes, it is wrong to withhold opportunities from people because you are prejudice, but I personally don’t want anything from you if you are going to judge me at all, whether it be by the way I talk, walk, look, or act. It is not wrong to make assumptions, it is just wrong to act out of hatred on those assumptions. And moralistically, hatred is wrong in itself.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
Response Blog FEBRUARY 1st
Right now my major is undecided, but since I have an elementary education minor, my major has to be declared in the college of Arts and Sciences. I am very interested in Sociology, but I also like Communications. Unfortunately, Communications is not in the College of Arts and Sciences. When I read “Sexism in English: A 1990s Update,” I was extremely excited because it opened my mind to the idea of linguist Sociology, or better, linguistic evidence of sociological observations. That, to me, is a slight mixture of the two subjects I am interested in, so it therefore brought me hope. I like to consider myself pretty observant, maybe about unimportant things, but I do find studying people interesting. The way we Communicate interests me, but I never realized the connotations my language in particular often suggests. I do normally put a masculine form of a word before an feminine, but I have never seen a problem with that. King and Queen, boys and girls just comes naturally to me.
In class, when we discussed “Put Down That Paper and Talk to Me!”, we got on the subject of equality, particularly the equality between today’s men and women. In the last paragraph, Tannen says that “Being admitted to a dance does not ensure the participation of someone who has learned to dance to a different rhythm”. I totally agree. We fight for equality, but we don’t often realize that there are differences, so a man’s equality and a woman’s equality often encompass different things. An example that is slightly off, but still proves my point is an episode I remember of Good Times. The black kids were allowed to take the same standardized tests in the same setting as the white kids, and though the black kids were no more or less smart, their test scores were low. This was due to a language barrier. The children could do math, but the question went something to the effect of ….If there were 4 kids and 3 went into the dining room and 1 stayed in the living room, how many kids were in the living room? The math was simple, but no black kid at that time in that community lived in a house and none had heard of a living room or a dinning room. They were not stupid, but they simply had not been introduced to that type of living. It was not an equal opportunity test. That also reminds me of the movie that we have to have watched by Monday. The black kids thrown into a sea of white kids for equality were not equal in learning. The same goes for men and women. Just because a man can do something doesn’t mean a woman should. This is true for lifting extremely heavy objects; there are women who are body builders who can do it, but our bodies are made differently than men. When the women mentioned in Nilsen’s article cut off their breasts to shoot their arrows better, it proved that having breasts made archery slightly more difficult for women. Certain things should be considered when determining equality.
In class, when we discussed “Put Down That Paper and Talk to Me!”, we got on the subject of equality, particularly the equality between today’s men and women. In the last paragraph, Tannen says that “Being admitted to a dance does not ensure the participation of someone who has learned to dance to a different rhythm”. I totally agree. We fight for equality, but we don’t often realize that there are differences, so a man’s equality and a woman’s equality often encompass different things. An example that is slightly off, but still proves my point is an episode I remember of Good Times. The black kids were allowed to take the same standardized tests in the same setting as the white kids, and though the black kids were no more or less smart, their test scores were low. This was due to a language barrier. The children could do math, but the question went something to the effect of ….If there were 4 kids and 3 went into the dining room and 1 stayed in the living room, how many kids were in the living room? The math was simple, but no black kid at that time in that community lived in a house and none had heard of a living room or a dinning room. They were not stupid, but they simply had not been introduced to that type of living. It was not an equal opportunity test. That also reminds me of the movie that we have to have watched by Monday. The black kids thrown into a sea of white kids for equality were not equal in learning. The same goes for men and women. Just because a man can do something doesn’t mean a woman should. This is true for lifting extremely heavy objects; there are women who are body builders who can do it, but our bodies are made differently than men. When the women mentioned in Nilsen’s article cut off their breasts to shoot their arrows better, it proved that having breasts made archery slightly more difficult for women. Certain things should be considered when determining equality.
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