{"id":2978,"date":"2014-12-15T19:01:26","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T19:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/?p=2978"},"modified":"2014-12-15T19:01:26","modified_gmt":"2014-12-15T19:01:26","slug":"write-something-see-biased","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/2014\/12\/write-something-see-biased\/","title":{"rendered":"When you write something, see if you are being biased"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"images\"<\/a>by Maya J., 6th grader<\/p>\n

Hey everyone, what would you do if you saw a woman getting abused by a man? You would stand up for her, right? Now let\u2019s switch the situation, what if a man was getting abused by a woman, what would you do then? Nothing, right? Well, it\u2019s because that\u2019s how we think about gender roles, and using different words for the same situation. Why? It\u2019s because of how our mind is set. We get these types of thoughts from the news, magazines, newspapers, and sometimes even books.<\/p>\n

So let me break it down for you. What does \u201cloot\u201d and \u201cfind,\u201d and \u201cstole\u201d and \u201cdiscovered,\u201d mean? Totally different meanings. So all I am saying is that writers use different words to describe the same situation, based on gender, or race. And it\u2019s wrong. So the same thing goes with gender.<\/p>\n

You guys all know about Hurricane Katrina, and how it mostly hit New Orleans. There was water waist deep. It was almost like a swimming pool. Anyway, there were this couple who had just gone to the supermarket and had gotten some food (keep in mind that it was a hurricane, and everything was flooded, so nobody had food,clothes, nothing!). Now there was a guy who did the same thing as the couple; he had also gone to the supermarket and had gotten food. News reports referred to the couple as \u201cresidents,\u201d and said they had \u201cfound\u201d the food from the supermarket. Now the guy who did the same thing was said to have \u201clooted\u201d the supermarket.<\/p>\n

Now I didn\u2019t give you all the bits of the story, the guy who \u201clooted\u201d the store was African-American, and the couple was white. Now that I gave you all the bits of the story, what do you think about it? Now just to let you know that type of language is called biased language. Now this is just my opinion, but if two people are doing the same thing, don\u2019t you think you should report just that? If you want to say one person was looting, you have to say the other person looting, too. If you want to call one person finding you have to call the other person finding too, no matter the race. We either all suffer the consequences, or all get praisings. Here\u2019s another example about biased language.<\/p>\n

So my English teacher Ms. Gibba picked up a student\u2019s pencil case and started looking through it. During this time the class was reading, so no one noticed her. Now you might think our teacher was a crook, (she just stole a student\u2019s pencil case.) \u00a0So when we finished reading Ms. Gibba told us to look at the stuff she had in \u201cher\u201d pencil case. We all said that it wasn\u2019t her\u2019s, it was another student\u2019s. She told us that she didn\u2019t steal, she discovered it. Well of course we didn\u2019t believe her, but then she started breaking it down for us. She said she saw it on a desk and claimed it, so it makes it hers. Now you might say that\u2019s crazy, but if you really think about it, it\u2019s exactly what Christopher Columbus did. He sailed the ocean to find \u00a0land and discovered land, and then he claimed it, but there were already Native Americans there.<\/p>\n

Now we never really hear that Columbus stole land. We hear that he found, claimed or discovered it. But isn\u2019t what Ms. Gibba did the same as what Columbus did? They both found something and then claimed it. See, it\u2019s biased language, and it\u2019s sort of like the example before; you use certain types of language for certain types of situations. It\u2019s might not be completely our fault, it\u2019s just how we always did things. Again, it\u2019s how our mind is programmed. Now this last example is definitely based on how our mind works, and it\u2019s about something that has been going on for a long time.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s about men vs. women. Now in STS we saw this video about how this guy was hitting his girlfriend, and men and women all came up to help and support her. (These people were just actors, so know one really got hurt.) Now they flipped the situation and had the woman hitting the man. So now you would think that everyone would do the same thing that they did for the woman, and stick up for him. Well, that\u2019s not what happened. The women and men nearby started laughing at the woman who was beating her boyfriend. Why, you ask? Well, I don\u2019t know for sure, but I have some ideas.<\/p>\n

First, I think that people don\u2019t think that women are as strong as men, so when the lady was beating up the guy people probably thought, \u201cOh, she couldn\u2019t hurt him.\u201d That is so untrue, 40% of men suffer abuse. That is a lot when you think about it. It\u2019s a little less than half, but it is something. Now I think we get these ideas about how women can\u2019t hurt men from movies and some books. Some movies show women primarily as someone who cooks and can’t defend or fight for themselves. So now in the world that\u2019s how we view these types of things.<\/p>\n

I hope we can change these types of biased messages and change the idea that somehow one gender is better than the other. Here\u2019s some tips you can use when you write or read. Always check for biased language, and if you see the writer has done that, you as the reader might want to cross out the word and change it, so it isn\u2019t biased anymore. When you write something, see if you are being biased. Whatever you do, help to try to change these biased ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Maya J., 6th grader Hey everyone, what would you do if you saw a woman getting abused by a man? You would stand up for her, right? Now let\u2019s switch the situation, what if a man was getting abused by a woman, what would you do then? Nothing, right? Well, it\u2019s because that\u2019s how we think about gender roles, and using different words for the same situation. Why? It\u2019s because of how our mind<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":130,"featured_media":2982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[198,189,205,192],"coauthors":[210],"class_list":["post-2978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-slider","tag-biased-language","tag-christopher-columbus","tag-hurricane-katrina","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/images1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/130"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2978"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2984,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2978\/revisions\/2984"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2978"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fieldstonnews.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}