Lunch & Learn #1_Leonie’s Workshop

By Brian Lee and Sonia Chang

Leonie Barkakati, a graduate student intern, provided an interesting perspective concerning stereotypes of different races during her lunch-and-learn on June 4th, 2015.

The workshop began with an icebreaker in which all the staff and interns wrote obscure facts about themselves on slips of paper which were then distributed randomly. From these slips, each person was instructed to guess who wrote the information. Though seemingly facile, the task proved difficult as some of the facts could apply to more than one individual. In context, Sonia found it amusing upon realization of our myopic views of each other and also because most of the predictions turned out to inaccurate. These instances led us to reinforce the notion that outer perception may differ from inner identity, sometimes even drastically.

Later on during the actual workshop, Leonie opened the discussion of prejudice and the focus centered around an interactive chart activity in which people would write stereotypes in the respective box that indicated the appropriate race. In the second row of boxes, we wrote down characteristics of people we know that are of the race labelled at the top of the column.

Here is a sample of the table:

Race:	Asian	Native American	etc...
Stereotypes (Row 1):
Traits of People We Know (Row 2):

During the first round (Row 1), the traits that were mentioned were relatively negative. They reflected the most caricatured features of different races. These representations reflected everything from facial features to familial relations to contemporary political issues such as police/civilian relations while, on the contrary, Row 2 proved to be purely positive and supportive.

The subsequent conversation reflected our conjectures concerning the influences behind our beliefs and attitudes to distinct cultures: The first row, as Leonie holistically summarized, indicated the effect of media burlesque and news bias. Movie portrayals, news broadcast spins on current events tended to support archetypes of particular races which were ingrained in our conception of differences. The characteristics noted in the second row which contradicted that of the previous could be attributed to our respect for the people we know as well as the intimacy of the relationships we hold with those individuals. All in all, it is impossible to universally generalize traits. Even though we wish to categorize people, every individual is unique with their own set of characteristics and traits.