Three Responses to #BlackLivesMatter, Individual Evolution, and Institutionalized Racism (A Tribute to Sandra Bland) and My Replies (Below are three responses to my previous essay. My responses are in italics.) N.’s Response: Michael, I just read your paper with great interest. You make a number of important points. However, you say repeatedly that not every group needs to follow all of the 10 steps [required according to IndividualEvolution.org] to be successful. However,… Read More
#BlackLivesMatter, Individual Evolution, and Institutionalized Racism (A Tribute to Sandra Bland) “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” -Assata Shakur. While I am certainly not qualified to compose a proper tribute to Sandra Bland, I am qualified as a social psychologist to analyze some elements of #BlackLivesMatter in… Read More
Unintentional Sexism: The influence of language upon media propaganda, individuals and small groups Abstract While propaganda in the form of unintentional influence and the language of sexism has been independently researched, a review of literature reveals no such studies that link these two topics. In this paper, I link these two subjects to study the hypothesis that the language of sexism, embedded within media, unintentionally influences individuals and… Read More
Reflections On Daniel Boorstein’s “Ten-Nine-Eight-Childline!” and “What Kind of Mother Are You?” History in the Western Hemisphere, especially the United States is filled with example after example of the upper classes, the rich and wealthy, engaging in social reform of the poor and the lower classes. But those rich and wealthy, who thought they knew better, passed judgment on those so-called poor and lower classes, and judged… Read More
Body Suspension As Individual (R)evolution While on one level the entire continuum of experiencing body suspension immediately incorporates IndividualEvolution.org’s (IE) heart, head, and hand, the wholeness of it also profoundly and radically transcends individual evolution and becomes an individual revolution, as I like to call it. It incorporates IE’s scientific method of inquiry, reaches beyond its body, mind, and spirit,… Read More
Reflections On McKnight & Kretzmann’s Mapping Community Capacity and Mathie & Cunningham’s From clients to citizens – Asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development McKnight & Kretzmann’s Mapping Community Capacity address an issue that I have puzzled over for many years: How can the government create an incentive to better one’s life circumstances without creating and perpetuating an environment of unhealthy need and dependence that engenders mere existence and probably hopelessness, to create producers rather than service clients? Unfortunately,… Read More
Reflections On Johnson, Murungi, and Pugh’s Naming our reality, Fine and Torre’s Re-membering exclusions, Kidd and Kral’s Practicing participatory action research, and Lykes,, Mcdonald, and Box’ The post-deportation human rights project (This is it folks. I may have found the research method of choice to write thesis and dissertation in social psychology and media studies respectively. It’s Participatory Action Research. Everyone teaches and everyone learns, including the study participants. Stay tuned.) Participatory action and the research that it entails give me hope for the future. … Read More
Content Analysis Hypothesis Development (And so the saga continues as I wrassle with determining a proper hypothesis. The below is an indication of how far I have come and ow far I need to go. But I am getting closer.) Original Hypothesis: Individuals and small groups are influenced by intentional sexist propaganda embedded in media texts that influence unintentional… Read More