Watch programming FROM other cultures, not just ABOUT other cultures.
If all you know about people that are different from you is what the news, Hallmark, movies and TV programs show you, you’re probably walking around with all kinds of stupid beliefs.
You don’t know Black people because you watch Maury, Baddies, or the news anymore than I know white people by watching Breaking Bad, Jersey Shore, and The Beverly Hillbillies. I’m intelligent enough to know that just because tv and movies show me a certain version of people most of the time that it doesn’t mean all people who look like that, talk like that, and live in those places act exactly the same.
Goodness, in my own family… my own household… their are numerous personalities. Why would I think that all people of a certain color, who have a certain accent, who live in a certain part of the world ALL act the same???? That’s stupid.
The ignorance that creates division and prejudice in society is conditioned by the powers that be. They control what we see and don’t see. They choose what movies to fund and which to never make it to the screen. They decide which news stories air and which go unnoticed. They paint the picture of what each culture looks like, what we envision when we picture a certain country, and what feelings come up when a specific demographic is named.
We are conditioned to believe certain things about certain people by tv programs. Our fears, expectations, beliefs and “certainty” about how “those people” live, act, interact, is all PROGRAMMED by the media. And those who are in power where we live control what we see…. unless we choose to look outside of what they offer.
If we don’t investigate for ourselves: read books, meet/interact online with people from other countries, watch programming from other cultures, engage with people with curiosity, rather than certainty….
If we don’t question how something like the color of ones skin, the neighborhood they happened to be born in, the status of their citizenship, automatically wires them to be this or that…
If we don’t start to look at nature and see the similarities in all living beings and recognize that humans naturally follow similar patterns…
If we don’t start noticing that if a brown egg and a white egg both have the same contents inside, that a brown cow and a spotted cow, or a black horse, a white horse, and a speckled horse….
… we will continue to think the most ignorant, hurtful things about those we don’t know, we will continue to put our trust in leaders who have their own best interests at heart, we’ll miss out on the most beautiful aspects of life…. the variety, the new experiences, the bliss of learning new ways to be, exist, live.
If we don’t seek to learn about who we’ve been taught to be afraid of—not from those who fear them, but from the people themselves— we will always, and only, see each other through the lens they place before our eyes.
…. we will continue to lose at the game they’ve created for us… the game that keeps the 1% way up there, and us all fighting way down here. There are more of us than them. But a house divided cannot stand. And they count on that.
This is the reason why in a nation that should be so evolved, all these -isms still exist.
We have to start noticing that the things we believe about each other must be coming from the same source, because there’s only one group that we’re not taught to distrust. It might make sense that their the ones spreading the rumors about the rest of us.
We will never come together if we continue to believe what we’ve been told about each other. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book. And we’re being, and have been, programmed to look at each other as the enemy. But the true enemy is the one programming us all.
Blessings,
Marlene Dillon Empowerment Specialist
