Prejudice and Discrimination - 1

In Plous’ Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination, Peggy McIntosh shares how she came to the realization that the idea of white privilege is denied and protected. As she made observations about male privilege and white privilege she came to the conclusion that being privileged is not always a positive thing. Privileged groups are over-represented suggesting dominance over certain groups and an illusion of meritocracy. It was interesting to see how group based differences in privilege was represented in a shopping mall. For this scavenger hunt, I went to Concord Mills and tried to do all of the challenges in TJ Maxx because I knew from previous experience that there is a wide variety of merchandise there.
It was surprising to see that the customers shopping at TJ Maxx looked just like the employees. At the TJ Maxx near my home, all of the employees are minorities and the customers are mostly white. In Concord, NC the employees were white females and the customers were white females.   The only differences were in age. A majority of the employees were young adults and the customers were mid-aged adults. A good portion of the adults were shopping with their children.
To start off the hunt, I found an entire display of Barbie dolls in the children’s section. They were different themes (i.e. Cinderella, Tinkerbelle, etc.) but a majority of the dolls had pink themes and White.   I did see some Barbie dolls that were black but there weren’t any other dolls that would fit in a different racial group. Looking for Barbie dolls on this scavenger hunt was the first time that I thought about how ridiculous it can be to apply race to a Barbie doll. Race is usually something used to categorize humans and although Barbie dolls are made to mirror human image so that little girls can relate, it still seems odd to place a plastic object into the same group as a human. Interestingly I did not find any GI Joes or any other male dolls. This is interesting because McIntosh talks...