Exploring the website Be More was a great experience as it was a departure from the normal 60-70 page readings due every week. Frankly, I enjoyed it much more than the usual readings since the website was interactive and easier to understand. The readings are cool too, but I liked the idea of exploring a website more.

Anyways, my impression of Be More’s goal is to essentially try to make people more aware of the distinctions between race, ethnicity, nationality, and culture. They also want to bring out awareness of unconscious biases which people do not realize they have. Overall, I think the website has good intentions, but the site itself isn’t very organized nor easy to navigate around. It just seemed very scattered to me. They seemed to put videos here and there just for the sake of having the videos there. Also, much of the content belonged to other sources.

Despite that, I found one video to be particularly interesting. I found the video under the “About” tab, leading to the “Resources” menu option. As I was scrolling down all the way, a video entitled “A Look at Race Relations through a Child’s Eyes” which was hosted by Anderson Cooper from CNN. The video explored how children of two age groups: 6 year olds and 13 year olds viewed race and race relations when shown pictures of two children on a swing set. There were two sets of pictures. In two of the pictures, the children were both girls and in the other two, the children were both boys. What was different in each picture were the races of the children. In some pictures, the child standing above was white and the child on the ground was black and vice versa. There was no context given to the pics and it was supposedly meant to be ambiguous.

The responses that they got back from the kids about race shocked me:

• “If you have the same skin, you can play together, but if you don’t have the same skin, you can’t play together…Your mom might not want you to play with that friend…because your mom will not want the to be a different color”.
• “Probably because they [the kid’s parents] might not like skin color”.
• “I’ve been bullied for the way I looked…my skin”.
• “My grandparents have a lot of um…they’re very racist against African Americans…but it’s 2012 so they have to push that aside. And they’ll be like no that’s wrong, you have to stick with your own race. I’m like no. I’m friends with everyone”.

In regards to the picture itself, the study found that many of the white children said that the black child in the picture pushed the white child off the swing. Most of them had a negative response to the picture 70% of the time. The video also said that the white children were more likely to say that the black child and the white child in the picture were not friends and think that their parents would not approve of them having a friend of a different skin color. In contrast, black children has more positive responses to the pictures with only 38% giving a negative response. Some of them said that the two were friends and that they were actually sad that one of them had fallen off the swing.

A lot of these views came from what the child had been taught at home by their parents and grandparents. The video also made an interesting point on how black families will expose their children early on to diversity and potential discrimination. In contrast, white families tend to ignore race and neglect to talk about it because they think talk about race creates the problem of racism.

The video really opened my eyes to see that children (the ones we see as most innocent and sometimes mistake as naive) are really more aware of what is going on in the world around them. They are not colorblind as we used to believe.