Race, Gender and Media Class Reflection Part 1

In this introductory week, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this class. I knew from some of my peers that this course was very informative to them, but I wasn't quite sure in what way. Getting to learn the foundations of Race and Gender in the Media sense and how they play a role in altering our perception of reality was very interesting, and I'm looking forward to exploring more.

In the first/second chapter of Rebecca Ann Lind's book, I learned a ton of new terms that I didn't know to their fullest extent beforehand, such as discourse, dominant ideology and social psychology of stereotypes. In my Introduction to Mass Media class, I was first introduced to the idea of media bias, media literacy, and all of the pros and cons that come with how the media frames what it tells the public, so most of this information we covered I already had a grasp on.

One of the more interesting activities I found and that I wish to discuss was the Buzzfeed quiz on "How privileged are you." Going into it, I thought most questions were going to be based upon race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Being a white, straight, Christian man, I figured my privilege score was going to be pretty high. However, as the questions went on, I was surprised to see some of the prompts deal with mental health, jobs, travel, body type, etc. While I figured I was going to be checking "yes" to every box due to my demographic, I was pleased when I found there were some things that even I struggled with and did not check off. I ended up with a score of 60, which is still relatively high, but the fact it was above 90 surprised me. I learned a lot of different concepts about what the term "privilege" can cover, and it opened my mind a lot more to the concepts we will be covering in this class.

Very excited for this semester.

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