Upon reading the excerpt from the Textbook, I became very confused with the word choice of the author. Instead of referring to the Native Americans as Native Americans, he or she referred to them as "Indians". This made me wonder how long ago this textbook was written because it is currently politically incorrect to refer to them as Indians. Later on, Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor infromed the class that this was from an earlier version of the textbook that we use now. This makes me question how much we should depend on what we read in our textbook this year. This reminded me of how often we find things around us that we don't take a second look at where the information comes from or how acurate it really is.
Teen girls worship magazines filled with juicy gossip like Teen People and Star Magazine, even websites like http://perezhilton.com/ . Each of these are sources of information, but how acurate is this information? There are people who disreguard much of the information they obtain from these sources, and others who believe it. No matter what, in the back of their mind they're still thinking about it, maybe accepting the information as true. There's always a chance that they will second guess their doubts or beliefs. The fire was started, and it is up to the reader to put it out.
The fire of calling Native Americans "Indians" was started when the explorers who found America confused the Natives with people who lived all the way in India! The inacurate name was left uncorrected for far to many years that people have just come to accept "Indian" as these peoples' true identities. In many situations, it has become easier to refer to Native Americans as "Indians" to avoid sounding too politically correct. Various Native Americans even refer to themselves as "Indians". This could be to lesser confusion or tension in order to speak more comfortably in a situation. On the other hand, it's just too bad that people from India have to be referred to as "South Asians" for the sake of being politically correct because of this mix-up!
3 comments:
I agree with the information Lindsey stated. Lots of pop culture tv shows, and maganizes should be question on their accuracy. A picture is worth a thousands words and with not enough proof to really know what is going on in an article or picture, why not question what it says. The reading this year goes along as well. Don't always believe the information in the text book. There can only be so much evidence for a proven fact.
Lindsey! Well done on your blog, I totally agree! We students refer to the textbooks to help guide us through our assignments, expecting and assuming that everything written in it is true. However, you have to realize that not everything in it is one hundred percent accurate and it is hard to comprehend that something we consider equivalent to a calculator in terms of accuracy can be wrong too! This concept makes it much more difficult to use the textbook with as much confidence as we are used to.
Good point Lindsey. Its hard what to know is okay to believe and what is inaccurate. You really have to question everything, and thats pretty annoying. But no matter what we do people are still going to be influenced by everything around us even the lies. Just like those teen magazines, i think people tend to get sucked in to juicy stories and want to believe them whether they're true or not.
Post a Comment