09-25-2019 IN CLASS POST

I believe that the majority of societal members interfere with a persons sense of self not out out of spite or hatred, but simply because they do not understand or they do not know any better because of what the entertainment industry and social media presents them with. For example, in “Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii,” Manoff explains how at Dartmouth University “the nonwhite students primarily stuck with their own race — blacks sat with blacks in the cafeteria, Asians with Asians, Native Americans with Native Americans.” To me, this seemingly paints a picture of every teen high school movie ever where you see all of the stereotypical groups at their respective lunch tables, with the “popular” kids always being the skinny white girls and the buff jocks. This directly correlates to Adichie’s TED talk, where she discusses the danger of a single story. The idea of being fed the same concepts over and over again through the entertainment that we raise our children on is what causes this misunderstanding. If there were more diverse literature, movies, tv shows, or movies, maybe our society wouldn’t be so judgemental of things that don’t look exactly like they do in the movies. In the second TED talk, the speaker discussed how the empathy of our society is lower than it had been in previous years.