Black and White

Today was a very interesting day and I was even able to learn from it. We spent most of our time doing an exercise with the words black and white. First, we had all of the girls write down words and phrases that had the words black and white in them. Then we gave them definitions of the words and had them label each of their phrases as being positive, negative, or neutral. We found that a lot of the whites had positive connotations, while a lot of the blacks had negative connotations. Examples of this include things like black eye and black market. This just showed how ideas are formed through language. This is something that people probably never notice but yet we can form feeling about ourselves through these words we hear. And how do you think these words and phrases make black people feel? This excersize helped to open my eyes even more to the problems of racism. I think the girls learned a lot from it as well.