Racsim ; Learning from Living

by Hannah Church

When I first sat down to write this post, I struggled. I didn’t know what I could bring to the cultural diversity and the media discussion. I don’t know what wisdom I have to impart on the topic. All I can give is what I’ve learned from life and growing up in the world I have. I feel that the best education a person can get comes mainly from experience. If you have a bad experience in a restaurant you’re not likely to return or give it a good review. If you go to a film and absolutely love it you’ll rave about it to your friends and encourage them to see it as soon as you can. And what about people? If you have a negative encounter with a person, you react. Some fight back, some take note to avoid in the future and most recount their experience to friends. This can often affect the friends’ judgement regardless of whether or not they’ve had their own encounter. This could be a far too confusing and convoluted analogy of how I believe media representation of different cultures can work. I don’t agree that traditional media is the best place to learn of other cultures. It can narrow our minds. With the introduction of new media however, there has been a new sort of revolution in the way people of all different cultures are exemplified and represent themselves and show their lives and struggles. We can be exposed to so much more now than we ever had been before. Our minds can broaden and so can our attitudes.

            I’m a twenty year old college student with no real worries or stress other than what I’m going to do once I’ve graduated. I’ve had it relatively easy. I’ve lived a sheltered, happy life and I, unfortunately, have not had many life changing or mind blowing experiences of different cultures. Other than visiting a few European countries every now and then on a family holiday, I’ve never travelled anywhere than takes more than four or five hours on a plane to get to. So I can’t actually regale you with any stories of my travels and the cultural education I’ve gained from each trip. All I have to offer what awareness I’ve developed over time of different cultures and how they can be represented or misrepresented and the obstacles that are still hindering a culturally diverse and developed world.

Living in my sheltered existence meant that many of my cultural experiences, outside of what I’d encountered on a few family holidays, came from outside sources. Mainly the media. The media nowadays is a regular form of education. We get our news and current affairs, our Information on people, places and events, and it can help to expand our knowledge and broaden our minds. Traditional print media and television can help in our education of the world. However, it can also end up interfering in our view on certain cultures. I watched a lot of television as a child. I would watch shows and cartoons on Nickelodeon, I would rent every Disney movie I could and I would love every minute. This is where my cultural knowledge started. Or lack thereof. The most popular shows at the time, and probably most impactful, were the American shows. I would notice small messages here and there within the shows. For example, all Asians are smart or nerdy or high achieving and not very social. Or all African Americans are cool or trouble makers. I would later learn that this was stereotyping and how damaging it is. We were fed closed minded messages like this so often. It’s really troubling how much of this stereotypical content is in children’s television.   I’ve never had to really face racism in my life. My only experience was in second class in primary school, I wouldn’t share my crayons with a class mate so she called me a racist. I remember getting incredibly offended, even though I didn’t fully comprehend what she meant, and I quickly assured her that she was wrong and actually I wasn’t sharing my crayons with anyone. After that day I stopped bringing in any crayons because I’d rather avoid the drama. I grew up not understanding racism until it was discussed in school. We were told in history class about the racism experienced by the Irish by the British. We learned about the atrocities Africans Americans were subjected to for centuries. We read roll of Thunder Hear My Cry as a class to teach us how wrong racism is and what it did to families and entire cultures. Though we knew that racism hadn’t suddenly become extinct it was easy to feel that it had only really happened in the past. To believe it happened when people were less civilised, when they didn’t know as much or understand empathy like we did today. “That was ages ago”, we could reassure ourselves. Having been exposed to the internet I can see that the world did not fix itself in the way we had been led to believe.

Through the internet we can be exposed to so many harsh truths. Not everyone has grown up with the same sense of what is right and what is wrong that I have. We can now see through YouTube, social media, bloggers and online news outlets racism is still out there. More so than we’d like to think. Scrolling through comments sections on videos or articles it is common place now to see at least one or two racist remarks. A simple YouTube search will bring you page upon page of videos with someone sharing their experiences with racism or even videos containing racist content. It’s eye opening. I am a particularly empathetic person, you cry, I cry. So consuming this content can be hard. But I’ve learned so much more about what is really happening in the real world than I had before.

With the introduction of this new media I feel like the conversation about racism, cultural diversity and identity has really taken off. Because though there can be some dispiriting content out there, there is also an army of people who are ready to defend and speak out and fight against the way things are. For example, the tragic cases recently of the shooting of Mike Brown and the death of Eric Garner in America were covered extensively online. Thousands of people came out in protest of the racist treatment of these men, showing their support in so many ways through social media. Stories like this may not have had as much coverage and may not have had a chance to gain as much support as they did if it had been left to traditional media to decide what story takes preference. With social media and new media the story, the issue and the outrage could all be heard clearly.

I believe that a culturally diverse and accepting world is so much more obtainable now with new media. There are so many incredibly intelligent and broadminded people from every corner of the globe ready to give support, speak out and defend themselves and others against oppression, racism and cultural ignorance. There are so many people ready to learn more than what traditional media has told them to be true. There are also people who will abuse their right to freedom of speech and will offend and insult and attack the developed and diverse mind-set. But it is important to know that there are people like that out there, and not just naively believe when your teachers tell you that racism was in the past. This is the only way we can continue learning and growing and fighting for a diverse, accepting future.