Affirmative action is a phrase that has grown to something like evolution. Many people see it and instantly get mad. I’ve found that I disagree with affirmative action on many levels, just because we haven’t found a balance that works for everyone. It makes sense to try to help balance people to have equal opportunities, but not when it starts to push someone else out of the path. For example, I’ve found that this has become an answer for some of our differences between our races. It’s like the old image of a race where white people left black people shackled at the starting line. When they were given rights, they were able to start running, but they couldn’t possibly catch up with the white folk. This is where government programs and charities and things like affirmative action are used, but I don’t think that that is right. First off, its too simple to think of ALL of Human history as a single line and a continuous event like a race. I feel like we’re beyond that. In the early days of our country, the society was outright racist and discriminatory. Now it’s a battle that deals with individuals, because our racism and discrimination is mainly done by individuals and how they see their neighbors. When someone passes someone for a job, and it’s based on their race or their ethnicity, it’s a personal choice. This is where we’re having problems. If you want to use the “race”, then in a way, other races are still being shackled, but instead of societal chains they’re being held by individuals at the starting line. The way that people like to stop this is by taking the people that are running ahead of those and forcing them to take a pit stop while the shackled people are given rides on golf carts to let them catch up. One of the major problems with this is the fact that we never feel that we’ve done enough. Should we let them stand side by side with the other races? Or should we give them a little head-start to help make up for what we’ve done to them in the past. This happens more than I care to count. The result is that the balance is lost and is actually flipped. Instead, we have white MALES being held back while everyone else is allowed to gain advantages because they NEED to be assisted. But how is that right? I sometimes feel like if I open my mouth and point out that I’m being discriminated against, then I’ll be seen as a racist ignorant guy. But it’s wrong! I’m all for helping out people who need it, but I think that we need to keep a balance. It’s not right to try to help one race and ignore the one on top. Why can’t we just look at each other as Americans and deal with it that way. If you don’t have the grades to get into school, then you shouldn’t get in with a scholarship. Poor people of all colors should have equal opportunities for scholarships and grants. I may sound racist to you, but I think that it’s more racist to look at race for eligibility, rather than merit. It blows my mind!

I completely agree with you about the school systems. I went to a very poor rural school, and I lucked out getting into Penn State. However, I think that you’re wrong in assuming that they would kill to be in your shoes. What happens in some of these very poor schools is that the kids don’t realize that they are being screwed over by the poorness of their school and education. They just assume that things are as they are and you just do what you have to do. At my school, the kids looked at me weird when I didn’t go to the local school for college. It’s what everybody does. I was wrong because I saw how bad my education system was, and decided to change.

I saw the same parallels with my life that you did. My church was very segregated and my hometown is very conservative and tends to shy away from diversity. However, I think that the statistics that Sam used and the way you group people are a little off. I think that its not just the factors we use to describe the people around us that affects their actions. Does that make sense? It was really wordy. For example, you said that you don't remember any people in your Roman Catholic Church that were people of color, and that was probably true. However, I don't think that it's because they're “Roman Catholic” people. I think it's because of the culture of your hometown and the ties that bind the church community together and makes them get together during that hour every Sunday. The same goes for the Republican/Democrat labels. Maybe it wasn't the political party affiliation that your neighborhood identifies itself with that affects their views. Maybe it's their ethnic background, or a union, or a recent event that pulls them together. I'm not trying to argue against your syntax, I'm just voicing my frustration with labels and the fact that we need to look at the bigger picture, i.e. all of Sam's statistics or Census reports, etc, in order to see what really causes people to act the way they do.

6/30/10
This lecture was really cool. When he mentioned hypocrisy and multiculturalism, I started thinking about where I stand with this. To be honest, I wouldn't be too upset living in a diverse community, but if I had to choose, I would probably want to live around people like me and the people I grew up with. Those people, just by coincidence, tend to be white middle-class country-folk. I'm not saying that there aren't any other races that live in the country, but I'd feel most comfortable with people who remind me of what I grew up with. Here's an example of diversity in my hometown and my reaction. While I was at PSU last Fall and Spring a Mexican-American family bought a small plot of land at the end of my road and built a new house. When I got home, my parents never told me anything about them, and I just found out their background about a month and a half ago when I met their son, who is my age and goes to OSU. It doesn't bother my parents or my family that they moved in, or that they have a different background. It doesn't really bother me either. I mean, I hang out with their son sometimes, but I don't go out of my way to spend time with them and I don't avoid them. I just go about my life. I guess I fit somewhere in the middle of the hypocrisy. My neighbors, on the other hand, hate them. My neighbor, who is the spokesperson for Redneck culture, likes to say that “Them there Mexicans built the house, then all 50 of them moved in”. It's stupid. Let me explain myself a little bit. When I said that I don't go “out of my way” to spend time with them, I mean it literally. I live in the country, which means that we're not as cramped as people are in the suburbs or the city. My redneck neighbor, Shelby, actually lives two miles from me, and the Mexican-American family lives three miles from me, which is FIVE miles from him. How strong is their influence that it's making him worry FIVE MILES AWAY?? I don't understand it. As far as the idea that we, as a culture who welcomes people in and feels comfortable among immigrants, demand immigrants to learn the language and culture of our country, I think that is definitely hypocrisy. I get frustrated when someone tries to interact with me in their language without trying to meet me in some “middle-ground”, but I don't care what they speak at home or when they're talking to another person from their culture. If someone moves in and completely avoids the culture that they've immersed themselves in, then I start scratching my head. Why would you close yourself off completely from something different? But I guess it's just as easy to ask that question of the Americans living around them.

I loved what he said about coolness too. I’ve noticed before that coolness is something that deals with how they act rather than how they look or what they wear, etc. Coolness is something that transcends race, and I think that being able to get past the first step of “knowing your race” is a big step for becoming “cool”. When you’re so comfortable with yourself that you know where you stand and what you are, then you’ve come to terms with the differences between yourself and others and you’ve at least starting to develop a list of what it means to be “white” or “black”. I think it was a great point in the lecture.

6/20/10
This week, I enjoyed the lecture like always, but I started reading the assignment for this section, and I can’t put it down. Some of the things she wrote in the first five chapters really blew my mind. The first chapter pretty much defined the problems I’ve run into with these topics. At first, I wasn’t sure what she meant by “your” people or her general “you”. I put two and two together pretty quickly. It’s a little weird to read, as a white person, but I can see how it helps her argument. The entire book is a conversation. When you’re reading it, you can imagine that you’re at the Circle that she mentions. At the beginning she establishes her determination to see this thing through by rebutting all of the common excuses for not talking about race and problems between races. One of the ones that she talks about that I come across often is the idea of trust. People of other races and colors look at white people differently, and they rarely feel like we’re sincere. I’m not trying to make generalizations, but I’ve seen her examples in action. She says that they don’t know us, and they don’t know what we do when we’re comfortable in our white communities with our privilege and our freedoms. I’ve found myself struggling when talking to people of other races, not just from the strain of trying to constantly be politically correct, but from trying to prove that I’m not just putting on a show in an attempt to be more socially acceptable. It only feeds into the stereotype to act like that. It’s frustrating to be honest. I find myself feeling like I just want to quit. It’s almost impossible to fight against this. How do I prove that I’m not the stereotype? Is it my fault? Should I just ignore it? All of these questions popped into my head when I was reading the book and I’m working on the answers.
Another thing that caught me off guard was the story she said about her brother -in-law and the joke. I can relate with her brother-in-law. I like to joke with races and stereotypes, and I’ve found myself in those situations before. It’s hard to joke with people. It’s a lot like political correctness; if you go up to eight different black people and asked them what they wanted to be called, and you would get eight different answers. It’s not that the jokes are offensive to everyone. I mean, I have a lot of friends that make white jokes around me and laugh when I shoot something back. There’s nothing behind the jokes and definitely no hate at all. I think that it’s good to joke, because they can open up a conversation. For example, when I joke with stereotypes, I tend to ask people whether they have any real foundation. Laughter makes people feel more comfortable with the topic. If they get offended, they obviously aren’t ready for the conversation.

I think that you bring up a great point with relating this lesson to children. It’s a common idea that children are blind to these lines and distinctions that we place on ourselves as adults, and I think that that is completely true. What you said to the other kid wasn’t racist at all; it came from the celebrated honesty of children. Kids are curious, and I think that that curiosity could help them to see past those distinctions I mentioned before, and maybe become better people. It’s a shame that you were seen as racist, you could have learned some pretty cool stuff from the other kid.

6/16/10
One of the things that really caught me in this lecture was the question about being “Disabled”. My father is disabled, and has been since I was eight. He isn’t in a wheelchair, but he is in so much back pain that he can’t leave his bed for more than 5 hours a day. His condition gets worse every few years when he needs to get another surgery on his spine, and I’ve had to watch my dad slowly lose pieces of his independence. As I watched him with this, it was like I gained a little more of my identity as I grew older. Now, I look at my dad, and I cannot possibly take for granted the fact that I can touch my toes, that I can run or jog down the street, or that I can have a job without worrying that the narcotics I’m on will affect my ability to focus and not make a vital mistake. I’m not the only one that had to go through it. My father lived it firsthand. With every surgery and new pain, my father tells me that he’s afraid what he’ll lose next. He’s learning just what he is, by losing what he was. It’s something that I cannot possibly understand completely, but I feel like I know better than to take what I have for granted. I feel as if I can identify myself as “able-bodied”, and fully understand what it means.
I loved the stand-up video. One of my favorite things about comedy is the personas that many comedians have. I think that the reason behind that is how, by picking a persona, the comedian is able to offer a commentary on the characteristics of that persona. For example, Larry the Cable Guy is acting in a caricature of a redneck man. Part of why I think he’s hilarious is because I live in the country. I’m not as extreme as “The Cable Guy”, but I can relate to what he says in his bits. I’ve seen people that dress like he does, and I have friends that have stories much like his. I never thought about what he was saying, but the moment he says it, I laugh because I knew it. The Weird Al video is the same way. Many of the things are classic stereotypical “white” things, and even though I don’t necessarily like all of those things, I know that they are clearly “white” things.
The fact that I look at those things and feel connected to them made me realize that there is an “us” and we have a list of stereotypes. This is where I think stereotypes are somewhat useful. We use them as a way of establishing our group and making it unique. Many of them are bad, but there are some good things as well. Either way, I think that stereotypes and jokes about stereotypes help us to go from stage one to stage two much more quickly than we would if we were stumbling around our world with no idea of what it means to be “white”.

I think that you’ve hit something really big when you mention the media. The media doesn’t realize how much power it has, and we are careless with what we will do in search of high ratings. We’re always trying to be the best thing on the television. This means that if we have 15 stories of positive images in Iraq and 1 really gory image of a soldier torturing prisoners or an interview with a prisoner in Guantanamo telling of how horrible we are, then they are going to pick the juicy stories that will shock the viewers. We are affected by the media without even knowing it, and the power jumps across nations’ borders as well. This projects an image that we really shouldn’t have. I think that’s a source to the problems we mentioned in class.

Ethnocentrism is something that is a constant factor in the world today, but we never really notice it. We assume that we’re just avoiding situations where we know that we wouldn’t fit in, but, I guarantee, the real source of this hesitation to participate in the situations is ethnocentrism. Why would we avoid talking to certain people? Why do we just keep quiet when in a group filled with people that are different from us? Why do we hurry past certain tables in the HUB that are filled with people that are different from us? The trick is, ethnocentrism can be stealthy. We have to look into these things that we do without thinking and see where the source for these actions lies. Is it guilt for racism that exists in the world? Is it because we are racist ourselves? Or do we honestly believe that we exist on a separate plane of existence from these people. I’m not saying to run into the HUB tomorrow and plop yourself down next to someone who shares no background with you and become best friends with him. No, what I think we need to do is have a private search for our own feelings and thought processes. If you find that you honestly feel that you are different from them and that you shouldn’t talk to them, then that is your problem. I just think we each need to be aware of the sources behind our actions, whether we can control it or not.
The idea of looking into the Arabic thought processes was fascinating in the Christian Invaders lecture. I absolutely loved this lecture. One of the main rules of warfare is to not empathize with the enemy, but I think that if we want to find peace and find a way to fix the damage we’ve done, then we need to do what we did in class. We need to look through the eyes of our “enemies” and see how we look as the “enemy”. I can easily see both sides of the puzzle, but I still know my place in the argument. My understanding of their position doesn’t stop the war. We need to educate the people in America. I’m amazed at how much we, as America, don’t know about Iraq, or any Middle Eastern country for that matter. We can barely find it on the map, but we still wanted to clear Saddam out of there. Uneducated masses are dangerous, and can easily be aimed at any enemy. Knowing this, I feel horrible for the Arabs in Iraq knowing this. But there is hope. We need to look at our enemy as humans. There is a reason why that’s not allowed in war. And that’s because it would end the war, and war wants to continue until only one side wins. I don’t think we need to force Arabs to be the losers. We just need to talk about it, but its too bad America doesn’t seem interested. Maybe if we made it a reality-TV show. That might work.