Tackling Terms

After interacting with the Under Our Skin project, I am a little upset to admit that I am not surprised by the ratio of ignorant people in comparison to woke people.

The majority of the participants did not understand the severity of the words and their concepts, which will further confuse students that do not have a firm grasp on the words to begin with. This kind of ignorance is continually pervasive and damaging to social atmospheres like schools and work places that contain a number of minorities longing for a safe space.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being ignorant. America was founded and established under the guise of white privilege, so the majority of people are not only trained to exist in a world where ignorance is common, but where their ignorance is also celebrated and encouraged.

The list of terms drew in me first. Many of these terms I’ve used in this blog post already without linking to a definition because they are on the linked web page of the project. They drew me in because if, as a society, we are going to discuss any level of social injustice issues or political reform, we need to know what we are discussing, and get on the same page about how each of these terms or concepts play a role in our lives.

I felt that this was a pretty representative sample of the different definitions of these terms, (as well as a lack of understanding) and I am now interested in seeing what my own peers would say abut these terms. I’m feeling a call to conduct a similar interview process and ask my peers about how they define these terms with an added step of discussing how they have personally been affected by them.

After reading the “About This Project” section, I feel that personal reflection is importants in journalism because what we see, isn’t always what we get. With this type of subject mater, opinion runs deep in the explanation of concepts and terms and it is hard to separate what is known as truth and what is believed as opinion, especially when they are each validated by a social construct completely out of our control.