Perception

Hello and welcome to my page!

Yes that's me above, caught off guard whilst queueing for my rice and peas at the conference lunch buffet. My name is Nathan Spence and I ran a workshop at the first UK National mix-d Conference which I called "Perception".

As with all the workshops, the idea was to build on and contribute further to the mix-d discussion, so I'd just like to open the topic back up again to those that couldn't make it with a summary of the thoughts and feelings captured on the day.

Here are two definitions I found that help get my particular point across.

"Perception is the opinion of an individual or group of people."
"In psychology perception is the understanding of information from the senses"

Putting the two together into something more meaningful, I would interpret it as "The opinions we make of people based on things we can see and hear about them"

Well take a minute to really think about these simple questions.

Is everything you see and hear about a minority group of people, particularly those of mix-d descent, a true representation of the entire community that they represent?

Can you really begin to understand somebody just from a picture or film clip without actually speaking to the person and getting to know them first hand?

How would you feel if somebody made assumptions about you, your personality, your values, where you go, who you hang with and so on, based only on the way you look or sound?

During the workshop we categorized all predetermined conceptions of the mix-d community into Image, Personality, Likes/Dislikes. Here is just a selection of what we came up with. And no, they're not all bad! We're just exploring the idea of perception as a whole

Obviously the list doesn't cover everything, and you'll probably have plenty more of your own to add. So is it fair that the fastest growing ethnic group in the UK is perceived in some of the ways we've summarised above? Clearly something needs to be addressed here.

You may already have your own thoughts on the root problem of these hugely general stereotypes. We discussed some in the workshop and decided on some possible actions to help put a positive spin on these backwards perceptions and turn the situation around. To name just a few they included: