9/26 Celebrity Identity

Today in class we continued the celebrity identity activity.  We looked at pictures of the faces of many celebrities and were asked to guess their ethnicity.  When we looked at the celebrities, our brains instantly made a judgement of skin color and guessed on ethnicity.  For example, we saw a picture of "Don Francisco", a popular tv show host, and were asked to guess his ethnicity.  At first glance, we would guess he is Mexican.  However, it turns out that his parents are actually German Jews.  From this, I saw that my first instinct when looking at the photo of Don Francisco was to judge him as Mexican.  However, I clearly learned that I was wrong and he is of German-Jewish descent.  During class we finished through 30 celebrities.  After realizing how wrong most of our initial racial judgments had been, we began to realize that we should think more about our initial judgments and become more open minded.  I think the main purpose of this lesson was to teach us to recognize when we are making an involuntary judgement.  In other words, it wraps back into the theme of Global: "Think about what you think about".  Overall, I thought this lesson was very helpful in making me a much less judgmental person.