Scrolling through my Facebook the other day I came across an article that really disturbed me. The article was about yet another death in the protest against Uganda passing a bill that would make execution the penalty for being gay. The punishment currently is life in prison. This astonished me. Not only is a person's sexuality not considered socially acceptable there, but it is actually considered a crime, and even worse one that is worthy of a death penalty.
From here I began to reflect. Thinking about our country's history with accepting LGBTQ rights. It was less than five years ago that we legalized gay marriage. It is still difficult for these people to adopt children. Also some job and places of worship are discriminatory against gay people. There are still many people that feel uncomfortable seeing people of the same sex hold hands or kiss and many people have difficulty telling their friends about family about their true sexuality out of fear of their reactions.
I drew connection from this idea to the article and discussion from Greg Reynolds on his research focuses. In his article, "Neural correlates of individuation and categorization of other species faces in infancy " he found that 9-month-old babies could categorize and individualize human faces. This was then examined using monkey faces (non human). When infants were primed with monkey faces they were not able to individualize but they were able to categorize and better recognize the non human faces.
He then went on to explain the new directions that his research which is a similar experiment to before except the comparison group is now human faces of a different race. Children raised in an environment consisting of a majority same race individuals were more likely to recognize and pay attention to same race faces. The fact that these children had so much more exposure to people of the same race, they had formed familiarity with them.
While a gay person may not necessarily look different, there are many people who are not familiar with seeing two people of the same gender participating in a relationship that has typically been thought to be between a man and women. Just as some people discriminate against others for the color of their skin or the part of the world that they are from, we seem to fear or even disapprove of traits that we are not familiar with.
Is there a way to work against this? We live in a world in which we can reach such a large audience through the news, social media, television, movies and even advertisements. If we could use these platforms and create products that showcase a wide variety of different looking/acting people we could begin to familiarize children with different kinds of people even if they are raised in a sheltered community. If we are able to familiarize children with these concepts and show positive portrayals of diversity, we could ideally start to accept that our differences don't really make us all that different from one another.
Sources:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/13j3ka06799we8d/AADhrxtnxeCFSnirlRdlnxzIa/(10.15.19)%20-%20Greg%20Reynolds?dl=0&preview=Dixon+Reynolds+et+al_2019.pdf&subfolder_nav_tracking=1
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/amid-kill-gays-bill-uproar-ugandan-lgbtq-activist-killed-n1067336
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