Personally I don’t believe my way of thinking has changed that much at all. I’ve always been open to the topic of race, religion, socio economic differences, and stuff like that. And that’s partly because of the social studies classes that I’ve taken throughout the years. Having lived in many different places and attended schools with very diverse group of people, I feel like I can sympathize with just about any ethnic group. Well maybe except for Muslims. I don’t really have much exposure to their lifestyle since I’ve never really known anyone of that group all too well. Ones that are open about it and really take their religion seriously at least. I would say I made my first Muslim friend up here at Penn State. I went to a Catholic elementary school, then I went to middle school in the Dominican Republic where almost all of the population is Christian. The people I went to high school with were either Christians or Jews, so I didn’t really get the chance to meet anyone that was Muslim. There is a very big misconception about them here in America, and it’s sad to think about it, but these people are harassed on a daily basis, especially those who wear ornaments or accessories that are symbols of their religion in public. This is a problem because this goes for Muslims who were born here as well. They were born and raised in the United States, yet they don’t get the full recognition of being American because of their appearance. One of the principles that America was founded upon was religious freedom. We can’t say that everyone is allowed to practice whatever religion they please, and then go around treating people differently because they look like a “terrorist.” It’s not right, and I think it’s a serious issue within our society that we need to address. My current only one Muslim friend is from Philadelphia. His family is from Algeria, and he to be honest could pass for Spanish because of his skin tone. He has never had the misfortune of being mistreated because of his religion because unless he told you, you would not know he’s a Muslim. He is very religious and doesn’t even drink alcohol because of his religion. He is also one of the most patriotic kids that I know, this friend of mine really loves his country. Probably even more than I do because I see too many flaws in America that I just can’t look beyond them to say that this is the greatest country in the world. It is true that I was not born here, but I’ve been living here for 16 of my 20 years of life, and I think I’m just as much of an American as anybody else. But what is unjust cannot be overlooked, because that’s just not the right thing to do.

When it comes to a story I hear, I’m always a little cautious about it. When it’s someone I know, it’s easier to tell if the story is a little exaggerated or just not true at all because you know this person’s tendencies. But when it’s a complete stranger, it is a lot more difficult to verify the validity of a story. When I am faced with the latter, I try to find out more about the story from other people. Whether it be from other people that I know or do not know, I try to match up the things that seem consistent in each person’s story in order to pull my own story out of it. I prefer to hear the story from a person that was there when it happened, but this is also something that is not easy to do at all times. When it’s someone you do know telling you the story, you have to judge his or her story based on the amount of credibility you figure this person has. I have friends that I know like to lie or stretch stories a bit, so I would probably not completely believe them. These people you should be weary about because it is so hard to tell whether they are telling the truth or not. And at times you just don’t know when to believe them, and that becomes a problem. But you also have those friends that you know are credible people that don’t find it amusing to joke around about something that is a serious matter. These people you will get the truth about a story to the full extent of what they believe is true. But that doesn’t mean that you have the perfect accurate story, your friend told you the true story as he/she sees it, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that is all. You could have an incomplete story or a completely biased story depending on the storyteller. I guess what I am trying to say is that it is always best to try and verify from other people the contents of the story no matter what the situation is. You don’t want to be that person that goes around telling improbable stories, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Another thing is, you will probably be guilty of stretching a story yourself. More than often when you tell a story you want to make your audience feel a certain way. You could want to scare them, excite them, impress them, etc… This some times requires you to stretch the story a little bit in order to achieve the required reaction. I think that as long as you have the important facts right, every other little detail changes when it goes from one storyteller to another.

If you were to ask me if women that show off their bodies in bikinis are disrespectful to themselves, I would say no. Maybe that’s because I’m a fan of bikinis since I’m a guy, but I can see where the argument comes from. Wearing little clothing can be considered to be provocative. This could draw comparisons/similarities to prostitution. Women who prostitute themselves thrive off of arousing men, and what better way to do it than to walk around with the least clothing on as possible showing off their merchandise. There is just a negative connotation behind women who wear very little clothing. It might not be disrespectful to your own body, but other people will surely disrespect you, and I think that that is where the problem arises. If you dress like a whore, people will call you a whore. That’s plain and simple. Society will be the one to disrespect you. On the other hand, revealing your body more shows that you are proud of it, and shows confidence.
If you cover up a lot, you are open to less criticism. If you cover up, people are gonna assume you are a decent person based off of your appearance. You can make the comparison between dressing ghetto and dressing in business casual clothing. A person who wears a polo shirt and khaki pants will get more respect over a person who wears a baggy t-shirt and baggy jeans. It's all about the image that these appearances portray. Baggy clothing and stuff like that reminds people of modern day street thugs that are all from lower class neighborhoods. These associations make people have predetermined judgment about people they do not know. Same goes for the women who wear little clothing, you’ll be quick to call her a hoe if you don’t know her.
For the case of Muslim women though, it is part of their culture to cover up. If they don’t cover up, they’ll be seen as indecent, and that is a huge issue in their society where honor is very important. They are very strict about maintaining a decent and modest image. Anything that does not exemplify these things would bring great shame to the family. Women who do not follow the norms of this culture I hear are punished and beaten. That’s why the cartoon shown in class said that it was a cruel male dominated world. The men are allowed to have multiple wives, but the women aren’t even allowed to show their bodies to any other man. It’s an extreme double standard that exists in their culture. I don’t think at this point that this will ever change in that society. It’s all a matter of point of view, and that’s the way they like it.

I wasn't very surprised when i saw the outcome of the "what would you do" video shown in class. The white guy who tried to steal the bike first received the benefit of the doubt so much from the people who were passing by the scene. They didn't really give him a hard time either. Some people claimed they contemplated calling the police, but they did not. When the black kid was stealing the bike however, almost everyone gave him a hard time about it. He was being confronted so much. Cops were called immediately that the kid said it wasn’t his bike. There was just so much hostility towards the black kid that was not there when the white actor was the one stealing the bike. Even though people won’t want to admit it, there were underlying racist intentions behind it. I feel like white America is just a whole lot less sympathetic to the youth that are not of their skin color. I don’t blame them either, because this is true for any ethnicity. It’s easier to identify and feel bad for someone that looks more like you than someone who is completely different from you. It might not necessarily be racist, but race definitely plays a part when a person starts to formulate assumptions. That’s what stereotypes are, assumptions. You assume an asian kid is smart and good at math because he is asian. You assume a black kid is bad and a criminal because he’s black. That’s how this works. It can’t be helped in America where black is seen as evil, and white is seen as good. As we saw from the video about the experiments with the black and white dolls, even children share this belief that white is right. It’s gonna be hard to get this feeling out of our self-conscious. We don’t really do it deliberately, it just happens. Evil is associated with darkness, so that makes sense. Honestly I don’t think we’ll be able to surpass this type of feeling until some point in the future where everyone will be so mixed that we’ll all be the same skin tone. That will be when racism ends. Perhaps. But even then there will always be the issue of social hierarchy. There will always be that divide of rich and poor. There is no way of getting rid of this type of disparity. It’s part of life. People’s ambition and their thirst for power leads them to want to accomplish more than others and step on those below them along the way. It’s human nature. They say man is inherently good, and maybe this is true. But we also have the potential for evil, and that we cannot change.

I don't think a person has to neccessarily be categorized as being in one stage. I think you can be in hybrid stages. You can be ethnocentric and still be for the empowerment and well being of other races.
I was born in the Dominican Republic, but I moved to a predominantly black neighborhood in New Jersey when I was 4 years old. For the next 6-7 years of my life I grew up surrounded by black people. I went to a Catholic school where almost all of my classmates were black. My parents were very protective of me. They used to tell me not to play on the street because they were very weary of the blacks. There was only one white boy in our grade an he used to get made fun of by us, because in that case he was the minority and we were the majority. Don't get it twisted, we were all friends. It's just we used to pick on him for being white. At this point since i was young and naive, so i was not aware of what racism was. I didn't feel alienated at all within black kids, I felt and was treated by them like I was one o them. I guess i thought because I wasn't white, i was part of the black kids. But because some of them were African, Haitian, or Jamaican there was that feeling of cultural differences. Especially since when we talked about the different things our parents cooked the differences were quite obvious. I moved back to the Dominican Republic and completed the 6th and 7th grade there. Things back in my home land were a lot more relaxed. Fitting in wasn't hard at all because i used to go back for most of my summers. After two years I moved back the the US. This time I was living in a town that was roughly half white and half black. At this point I had very little exposure to white people and didn't really know much about them. I remember that on my first day in the 8th grade, and for several weeks I only hung out and sat with black kids. Throughout high school I met more of the white kids and was friends with them. But i felt like I didn't fit in. Some of them were very condascending. In our high school there exists a bullshit education level system that seems more like a segragation. Most of the white kids were in level four, which is honors level classes, and the black kids were all mostly in level 3. I was in level 4 classes all throughout high school an I could tell that there was a gap in education.

Asides from offering interesting plots for movies, I don’t think I’ve ever been a fan of war. War in my mind should be the last option when all else fails. It should be sort of a backup plan, and it should only be carried out after your way of life has been threatened as George W. Bush claimed back in 2001. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a fan of the man. I am strongly against the United States interfering in things that doesn’t concern them. One of the men that I really look up to is Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and not because of his political ideals, but because of his will to help others in need and his belief of giving back to the people. He fought to help South American natives regain some of their rights that have been stripped away by imperialism in the Americas. He was against imperialism, and that branded him as a radical and made him one of the most wanted men in the world during his time. The wealthy upper class in South America wanted him arrested badly for all of his influence against their companies, and they of course to a certain extent controlled the governments and armies. The United States saw him as a threat to its Capitalist ideals, and thus interfered here too. Guevara was caught and executed in Bolivia by the Bolivian army with the aid of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Personally I think America should have stayed out of that conflict.
I understand that we drop a lot of money on our military and weapons, and that’s cool in all, but I think it should be more important to help our homeless and young adults who could use more scholarships to go to college. So much of our money is spent on weapons of destruction, when it should really be spent to create more opportunities and promote new ideas. We have the most guns, and the most nukes, that doesn’t mean we should wave our big stick policy everywhere. Around the world we’re seen as bullies, and there are videos like the ones showed in class that prove to a certain extent that we are. We invade your country and then claim to do what we think is best “for everyone.” But the truth is we are only looking out for our best self-interest. I believe that our soldiers mean well, they are just following orders. But the government should really reassess some decisions that are made. We left Iraq in shambles, and I don’t think we plan on doing anything about it. I’m still not convinced that we even won the “War on Terror.” They can capture/ get rid of one person, but I’m sure there will always be someone else who has the same negative feelings towards us. It’s a vicious cycle that never ends.

I personally don’t have a big reaction to this picture. It’s just two guys kissing. I feel like I have seen this so much on TV and movies that it neither bothers nor surprises me. One of my favorite shows is Modern Family, and in the show there is a gay couple with an adopted Asian baby. The two characters are both very flamboyant, one more so than the other. They have their gay love moments, but they are also very comical in what they do so it sort of relieves all tension and don’t make the moment seem awkward. By showing this type of relationship on TV you are helping to desensitize the audience when it comes to homosexual couples/families, because that’s what they are: a family. And curiously enough, unlike the Asian man in the video clip says “that it becomes sexual,” I don’t feel like in any of the 50+ episodes that I’ve seen of the show have they ever been close to being sexual. They do show signs of affection for each other, but it never seems like something over the top. Just like this picture, it’s nothing over the top. It’s a picture of a couple that has not seen each other in a very long time. Not only that, there is always the uncertainty that the Marine might not comeback alive. Every display of affection could be their last, so they have to give it all every time.
When it comes to gay marriage, I’m all for it. I don’t think it’s right that we should take away someone’s right to get married with who ever they want just because they are of the same sex. These people by the constitution are allowed to practice religious freedom. And if they can get married in whatever religion they believe in, why do we let another person’s religion dictate what these gay couples can or cannot do. Another thing is there should be a complete separation of church and state, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. It makes no sense to me how you can make any type of decision that has to do with society’s well being based off of religious beliefs, it just doesn’t make sense. By not letting gays and lesbians marry you are just making life a lot more difficult for a large group of people in America. We as compassionate human beings should allow these people to live their lives as they please, just as we live ours. Just because they are not your traditional form of family, they are still capable of living like a family and raising children. They might not be able to have their own kids, but they can always adopt. We live in an age where there are many kids out there without families living in orphanages. These kids could use a home, and the gays could help raise a lot of these children.

I really do think that race and class go hand in hand. You can’t talk about social class without taking race into consideration. In terms of appearances I think if you put a white male and a black male in the same exact clothing, people would think that the white male is probably in a higher social class. You would expect the white male to be better off or richer. And I think this has a lot to do with the fact that on average a white household’s income is higher than the average black household income. But as it was mentioned in class, your income level is highly dependent on the education you received, your parents’ income, your contacts, and of course race. I’m sure that still today there are people who think blacks deserve to be paid less than whites. This stems from the idea of White Superiority. Basically they think that a white person can do a better job, and therefore should be paid more. This as well as the rest of White Supremacist believes are results of pure ignorance. If anything, history has showed us that blacks and Hispanics are the better workers, white people are rather lazy when it comes to physical labor. They rather hire someone else to do their work for them. But I guess that’s just one of the advantages of being the upper class. You can afford to pay someone else to do things you could have done. Or pay someone else to take care of your kids. Come to think of it, I have never met a colored person who had a nanny growing up, but I have met several white people who have. Asides from the socio-economic aspect of it, I think blacks and Hispanics are more cautious about who takes care and interacts with their children. This is especially true for immigrants. I remember we were talking about this in our discussion groups. We came to a resolution that immigrant parents were stricter when it came to going to other people’s houses, and disapprove of sleeping over. I can personally attest for this. White parents are more lenient about their kids sleeping over at friends’ houses. I’m not quite sure where that distrust originates from though. Back on the topic of nannies though, typical nannies on movies and on tv are usually black or Hispanic, which I think is another sign of differences in race. Maids are usually brown as well. These little things are the kinds of things that put white people on the top of the social pyramid. They can afford all of these commodities, and the colored people are the ones doing their work. That’s just the way our society is, I don’t think there’s anything we can do to correct this because those who are on top have the power to remain there.

There are various factors that lead athletes to be very successful. Race happens to be one of these factors, but it is not the only factor. It is true that black people dominate in the basketball and football industry. Partly because of their physical characteristics that usually allow them to be big, strong, and fast. These traits have been passed down from generation to generations from their African ancestors. Ancestors that were very skilled at chasing down prey in the Saharan and Sub-Saharan deserts for many decades before they were brought to North America. And even then they worked under rigorous conditions. This is where their natural physical abilities stem from.
Another factor is the popularity and dedication put into sports in the family of the individual. Parents who like a certain sport usually raise their kids playing these sports. This exposes the child to the sport at a young age, and you know what they say: “Practice makes perfect.” So the kids throughout the years get better and better through experience.
Another thing that has to be taken into consideration is that sports are often seen as a person’s way to get ahead. Whether it be through scholarships or being drafted to a professional sports team. For example, a person who wants to go to college but doesn’t have the best grades can apply for athletic scholarships. Being drafted to a school usually means you will receive some type of financial aid for the talent that you bring to the table. And if you are exceptionally well at what you do, then you have a really good chance at being drafted or sponsored in a professional sport. There’s also the chance that you can also be so well known for what you do that you can be drafted right out of high school or when you’re legal of age. For black people being good at football or basketball is one of the ways that can lead them to success/stardom. There are so many black superstars in the world of sports , and they inspire other black youths to go out and play as hard as they can so that they can also achieve their goals.
For Latinos the story is a little different. Baseball is the median to success when it comes to sports. In the Dominican Republic baseball is huge. Everyone watches baseball, and every child growing up wants to be a baseball player. There is so much poverty on the island, and everyone has big dreams. All the young men growing up dream of becoming a professional baseball player and being drafted by a big Major League team in hopes of attaining a better life for themselves and their families. Almost all of the Latino players that play in Major League Baseball, come from very humble backgrounds. Very poor families with very little chance at attaining a good education. At this point, baseball becomes their only way out of that kind of lifestyle.

I was born in the Dominican Republic, and spent the first five years of my life there as well. I can tell you that it is not that we want to disassociate ourselves, it’s more that we want to be identified for what we are. Growing up in America I’ve been subject to people asking me if I’m Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, etc… I, as well as the rest of my people, am proud of heritage. We’re known for being lively and very rich in culture. We love our land, food, music, history, and other arts. We love pretty much everything. Dominicans are very attached to their culture. While a lot of other Hispanic nationalities can easily assimilate into American culture, the Dominicans are not the same. We hold on to our way of life so dear. My mother for example is very attached to her roots. She doesn’t eat anything that is not traditional Dominican food. She’ll eat an occasional sandwich of bagel for lunch, but for dinner it’s always something that she made herself from scratch. Most of our family still lives back on the island, and we go back at least once a year to see as many of them as possible. This helps us keep in touch with our past. There are however a couple of Dominican “colonies”, as they call it, on the east coast. There’s a very large population of Dominicans in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and State Island. There are also a lot of them in Passaic and Paterson which are in New Jersey. Dominicans tend to go where other Dominicans are, naturally like any other ethnicity. You wanna be where you feel welcomed the most. And that happens to be with your people, the ones you can identify the most.
I actually consider myself part black because of my descent and where I grew up, but first I want people to know that I am Dominican. When I was in elementary school and part of middle school, I went to a private school where the majority was blacks and hispanics. We had a handful of white kids, and that was all. There was no type of discrimination there between the latino and black kids. We were all pretty much alike. But when I moved with my mom to a town that had a large white population, there was a clear divide. I immediately was able to identify myself with the black kids, which I felt more comfortable talking to. It was a little odd, because even though they were friendly to me and accepted me among them, it was obvious that I wasn’t one of them, so I kinda stood out. I was in that situation for like a year, and then eventually grew out of it in High School. Partly because I was in higher-level classes where most of the students were white. In my high school there is an old leveling system that has traces of racism left in it. Hopefully some day they will change that though.