naivete and stereotypes...

It has been awhile since I have posted anything on here because I have just been so busy lately. Something happened recently however that I feel I need to share because it deals with misperception and stereotyping. My fiancé works in home health care. She hires people to go out and tend to patients. The other day she had a problem with a patient because the patient's son did not like the attendant that was assigned to his parents. The reasoning behind this was because the attendant was Hispanic and spoke choppy English. The patient had trouble understanding some of the things that the attendant would say. The son, who has always been very nice to my fiancé, suddenly got very angry with her because she was the one who hired this attendant. My fiancé did not know it would be a problem and told him that she would fix it. When she was asked how she could understand the attendant she said it was because she could speak Spanish. My finance is half Mexican. The son was dumbfounded because she does not look Hispanic and she did not have an accent. He said that she could not be trusted by him anymore and that he wanted to talk with someone higher up in the company simply because she was Hispanic.
Having told that whole story the point of it is this:
This sort of racism shows just how naive people can be. His views on Hispanic people are that they look and talk a certain way. That is obviously untrue if you look at my fiancé. He focused on the stereotypes of that race. Everyone has perceptions about how people from different ethnicities because of stereotyping. This was just something that is very close to me and I felt I needed to write about it.

who's to say...

I have finally read an article I had been meaning to read for the last couple of weeks about a photographer named Edward S. Curtis. He is best known for photographing Native American Indians in at the beginning of the 20th century. His photos are iconic. They show noble “red men” on their horses or simply standing in their supposedly authentic garb. To me the photographs look too perfect to be truly authentic. It seems near impossible for Curtis to have gotten these pictures by simply standing around and shooting what he saw. The author of the article mentioned that he wondered how much money he gave to the Indians to get them to pose. I thought that was a funny and thought provoking. Also, did Curtis have any say in what they wore? Did he shape our ideas of how we see Native Americans? All of the Indians in his photos look like the stereotypical Hollywood Indians from the old westerns. Of course who is to see what is real or what is not. In my opinion I just don’t really believe that Curtis captured the vanishing Native Americans. He most likely captured peoples’ imaginations instead.