Conditioning In Our Society

In class we have been talking about the two cycles of prejudice. These cycles are conditioning and thoughts and expectations. Conditioning in simpler terms is another word for brainwashing. We experience conditioning through numerous different outlets. Whether it be the news, social media, television, or movies. For instance, Mr. Cassidy showed us scenes from the Disney movies The Little Mermaid and The Jungle Book. In The Little Mermaid, Ursula calls really skinny people and really fat people desperate. She also insinuated that all women need are a nice body and not a voice. This is conditioning young children to think that they shouldn't be comfortable with themselves and what they look like. If children are conditioned to think a certain way they will never find their true identify. The second video we watched was from the Jungle Book. The first thing you notice is that the song is I wanna be like you. This teaches children to try to be someone they're not. The second thing you notice about the video is that the monkeys sound like black people and are listening to jazz music. One monkey even says "cuz". This is extremely racist because black people have been known to be called monkeys. Mr. Cassidy also showed us an experiment done with young black children. The experiment consisted of someone handing a black child a white doll and a black doll. The children were asked to choose which doll they felt was better, and a majority of the children chose the white almost instantly. When asked why they chose the white doll they said it was better. The children automatically expected the white doll to be better just because it is white. This experiment amazed and shocked me but I was also upset with the results. It showed me how soon conditioning starts with young black children and how we are trained to not love our people and accept who we are. This video was a real eye opener for me and I'm sure the rest of the class. One question I have is: how can we prevent conditioning at a young age? It may be impossible unless you stray from all types of media but even then people can condition you in real life. We might not be able to prevent conditioning but we could try to allow positive conditioning instead of all the negative information we are being fed.