Gender, race and prejudice

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Identity Development/Psychology, Latino Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2017-03-20 18:45Z by Steven

Gender, race and prejudice

Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, New York
2017-03-20


Leigh Wilton

“As an experimental social psychologist, I’m interested in how people see each other and how that affects their interactions,” says Leigh Wilton, who joined Skidmore’s psychology faculty last year. Her work focuses on race and gender. “People have expectations about gender and race,” she says, “but what happens when they encounter challenges to those beliefs, such as people who have mixed-race or nontraditional gender identities? What are the consequences, in terms of interpersonal and group relations, of the assumptions we hold?”

The essentialist school of thought holds that these identities are mostly in-born and immutable, rather than socially constructed and learned. But as Wilton points out, there’s no support for a scientific concept of race, and she asks, “If people see racial traits as genetically hard-wired, what do they think when they meet people of mixed-race parentage?

For Wilton, it’s more than academic. With a Latina mother and white father, she grew up with a natural curiosity about what social identities really mean and also with a drive to test ways of improving social interactions across difference…

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Louise Erdrich, Matthew Desmond Among Winners of National Book Critics Circle Awards

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2017-03-20 02:21Z by Steven

Louise Erdrich, Matthew Desmond Among Winners of National Book Critics Circle Awards

The New York Times
2017-03-16

Alexandra Alter, Publishing Reporter


Louise Erdrich outside her bookstore, Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis.
Credit Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Louise Erdrich’s novel “LaRose,” which centers on two Native American families in North Dakota whose lives are upended by a horrific hunting accident that kills a 5-year-old boy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction on Thursday.

Ms. Erdrich, who has published 15 novels, won in an especially competitive year for high-profile literary fiction, with Michael Chabon, Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith and Adam Haslett among the finalists.

“I’m among such dramatically wonderful novels that it didn’t seem that this was possible,” Ms. Erdrich said in her acceptance speech, before making a passionate plea about the importance of free expression and the need for writers and journalists to challenge falsehoods.

“The truth is being assaulted not only in our country but all over the world,” she said. “More than ever, we have to look into the truth.”…

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