http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/02/white_woman_admits_an_inner_george_zimmerman.html

[indent][indent][indent][indent][indent]

In his remarks regarding the George Zimmerman verdict last summer, President Obama challenged Americans to &#8220]Changing My Screensaver or Desktop Picture

In a July 19, 2013, story on implicit bias, NPR explained how a team of researchers studying implicit bias found that teaching people a history lesson about the injustice of prejudice was completely ineffective (thank you, token high school history classes on the history of black America). However, by exposing people to counter-stereotypical messages—for instance, by showing people images or words that “bucked the trend” of what we usually see in our culture—implicit bias could be lowered. One of the researchers, psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, took the findings to heart and programmed her screensaver to flash counter-stereotypical messages at her all day long. I am committed to changing my screensaver to images of black men pushing baby carriages, working as doctors and assuming other positions of authority.

Changing the Shows I Watch

There are a lot of shows out there, and while one can long debate whether shows portraying people of color in “typical” roles (i.e., the black women in prison in Orange Is the New Black) are racist or not, I’ve decided to veer away from them. Regardless of a show’s accuracy or inaccuracy, regardless of what the show hopes to accomplish, seeing people of color in “typical” roles reinforces stereotypes. For my guilty trash TV, then, I’m steering away from Orange Is the New Black and instead watching Scandal, which stars Kerry Washington as a super-intelligent political fixer. (Washington is the first African-American female lead in a network drama in almost 40 years.)

These steps may seem frivolous, but fighting racism doesn’t need to be all grand policy changes. It can—and should—start with an honest look at ourselves. I’m not a big Tolstoy fan, but the one thing he got right was this: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
[/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent]