My Beautiful Question: How can we as young women change/inform other’s perspectives to be more open minded and be more willing to accept differences of minority groups?
According to Berger, “A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.” (Berger 8) I believe that my question is “ambitious yet actionable”. It is ambitious because it is questioning why we don’t take stand against unfair “societal rules” . These “rules” are created by society and are upheld through stereotypes and labels. The question asks what we as a society can do to take stand against the injustice created by “societal norms”. Although the action that the question encourages is ambitious, it does encourage the society to take a stand towards fixing, or changing, these societal norms and to become more open minded so that their opinions and judgements are not based off of stereotypes.
I created this question because it is a problem which has been going on for such a long period of time, and the question relates to me specifically as well. Minority groups are constantly fighting for their rights, they are continuously fighting to be treated equally and to be accepted into society. Although people participate protests and movements, these are changing society little by little, but not changing people’s views overall. I believe that if people were to be more open minded and accepting, minorities would be accepted in society, and there would be less oppression. People would be less ignorant of the differences of the minority groups, and would be willing to embrace them them instead.
While going through the different subject rotations in my Leadership class, the rotations of communication and Asian studies were the two topics that connected the most with my question. During the communications rotation we talked about how our whole world is able to communicate through social media, through pictures, more specifically through memes. Ultimately our perspectives are also shaped by the media. What we see and hear online or through the news, influences the way that we recognize the world around us. We tend to jump to conclusions and even develop stereotypes about some things that we remain ignorant about, but we do it because that is all that we learned through the media. Stereotyping can be very dangerous, as it can lead into discrimination. In the Asian Studies rotation, we learned about how stereotypes can lead to misunderstandings about people’s race, religion, culture, etc. We, as a society, need to be careful about how we interpret the things that we see and hear about different people around the world.
