If I were to see a poor immigrant in a tough situation I definitely see myself helping him or her. I do not think turning him or her away would be the right or humane thing to do in that situation. In the end, we are all human beings pursuing the same things: happiness, comfort, love, and acceptance. These people are, for the most part, not bad people. Like Sam said, illegal immigrants are hardly if at all the source of the problem when it comes to violent crimes committed in the United States. All they want to do is start over and make a better life for themselves which is something I am sure we all would want the chance to do if we needed it.
In a way, we should be flattered and proud of the fact that these people go to such great lengths to enter this country. Even though when they get here they live in poverty and make next to nothing when it comes to wages they still want to be here and see a light at the end of the tunnel when they are here. They recognize that we are the land of opportunities, we as Americans have succeeded in building that honorable reputation for ourselves. Why would we want to be known as a country that is so stuck up due to its success and prosperity that we rudely refuse to share it with others? We were all immigrants at one point or another; the only people who are truly natives of this country are Native Americans. So we should not be so harsh on illegal immigrants trying to pursue what our ancestors did not so long ago.
Do not get me wrong, I do not mean to say that we should just open up our borders and let the masses swarm in and go crazy. That is not at all what I’m saying. I agreed with Sam when he said that any successful and civilized society has to have control at their borders; we have to know who people are. But we will always have illegal immigrants to some proportion here, there is no controlling that. Never at any point in our history has every single person living on this land been legal. So all I am saying that the illegal immigrants that do make it in to this country and are just trying to make it we should treat well and show them why they knew to come here to reach their goals.
Also, like Sam also said in lecture, we have to always remember that the illegal immigrants help us a great deal. And most of them simply want to make money by working for us and then go home, or they are working to become citizens and productive ones nonetheless, and what is wrong with that? So all in all, there is much more pressing problems we should be concerned about.

After the lecture Sam gave on Native Americans, I definitely went home and told a bunch of my friends about some of the stuff he said. And my friends were definitely just as disturbed and saddened as I was. I say time and time again how easy it is for our generation living in the United States to hide from and not think about issues such as the genocide of Native Americans. We get so engaged in our culture and can live happily without ever reading a history book or even watching the news. It seems like nothing really ever affects us. We live in a bubble. But when Sam so candidly explains things such as this, it definitely opens my eyes to things I probably never would have thought about otherwise.
Overall, what disturbs me the most about our relationship with the Native Americans and their current state in this country is not so much what we did to them but what we are currently doing to them now when we should obviously know better. We are always careful not to make too much fun of the Holocaust or any other mass genocide or terror attack because it is something that affects people to the deepest of levels, yet we basically ridicule Native Americans who suffered the biggest genocide in history. We put them on reservations and pay no mind to the fact that alcoholism and suicide are growing in exponential numbers within Native American communities. We even name major sports teams after derogatory Native American terms that we ourselves created. It’s despicable.
It also comes down to the childhood lesson we all received by our parents for as long as most of us can remember: don’t do to others what you would not want done to you. This lesson was also the basis of Sam’s Christian Invaders lecture as well. If China did to us what we are currently doing to Iraq, we’d be so up in arms it’s ridiculous. And if new settlers from a foreign came over here and started killing everyone and taking our land, each and every one of us would be rioting and fighting back hard. And on top of that, if we were ridiculed after we were defeated and forced to live on designated land with limited resources and such risk for destructive lifestyles, we would also be completely outraged. Yet, we believe we can do it to others.
I think we Americans (myself included) have to shake the idea that just because our country is rich and we have a million resources and opportunities and clean land that we are better than everyone else. Like Sam said, it is only by chance that we were born where we were and we could have just as easily been one of the many Native American children either killed in the genocide or now forced to suffer the consequences of it. What would you do if it happened to you?

Putting myself in the shoes of a Middle Eastern Iraqi definitely changed my perspective on the War in Iraq for the better. I was always against the war knowing that it was about oil for the most part and that we are oppressing people for weapons of mass destruction that never existed there. I have always felt guilty about the suffering and the killing of the civilians in the Iraq, even more so now that I heard the 29:1 statistic of civilians to bad guy.
I always think about how fortunate I am to have been born in the United States because we all could have been born in Iraq just as easily. Here we can essentially hide in our own lives and never have to interact or care about what’s going on in the outside world. There in the Middle East and especially Iraq people do not have that luxury. So much so that they can’t walk outside without seeing men with huge guns and tanks and hearing bombs being dropped not too far away. Thinking about that even more, it makes me even more set against the War in Iraq.
Also, watching the videos of how some of the American soldiers in Iraq are treating the civilians in Iraq was so disturbing as well that if I picture myself as an actually Iraqi in the Middle East I would be so infuriated and bitter. Especially the video when they took the tank and ran over the one man’s taxi cab for stealing some pieces of wood. If I heard about that on the streets in Iraq I would definitely hate the Americans as well. It is not their job to police the civilians; I mean do they police civilians in their own country? It is your jobs to keep me safe from the weapons of mass destruction that you claim are in my country. Knowing now that stuff like that happens just solidifies even more for that this war is wrong and unjust and against all that the United States of America is supposed to stand for.
I really think Sam Richards did something important for all of us during his Christian Invaders lecture. Maybe a lot of us are not really too concerned with the War in Iraq because like I said, it is not exactly in our faces, but at least he taught us the importance of being able to take the perspective of another person. Like Sam said, the ability to get perspective of another will help us on all walks of life because hardly anyone does anything for some crazy reason that can’t possibly be understood with some effort. I hope that not we will be able to do just that with regards to all issues of race.

I actually brought up this question in a way during one of our discussion groups two weeks ago. One of us brought up the blonde girl from UCLA bashing the Asians publicly on YouTube because they were talking in the library (so it was kind of funny when Sam ended up showing the clip in class), and naturally we all reacted angrily and said things like “if I was at UCLA I would punch that girl in the face” or “if I was in the library I totally would have said something”. Of course, I was in agreement, but then I thought more deeply about it and I wondered, would we ACTUALLY say something? It is easy to say we would combat racial slurs the second they happen, but a lot of times we tend to not say something in order to avoid confrontation or to avoid causing a scene.
So I definitely like this question because I thought of it too myself and dwelled on it, and I promised myself that I would say something. In the class we also asked ourselves if racism would ever not be a problem or an issue we need to discuss, and I think we all basically agreed that as long as we all look different physically, the race issue will always be around. So since this is the case, we have to find a way to at least make the best of situation. And that means sticking up to racism if and when we do see it. Just like bullying, there will always be bullying but there will be less bullying if we learn to stick up to bullies.
We just have to keep reminding ourselves that watching people be the victims of racism without doing anything about it is just as bad as being the person voicing the racial slurs. If we don’t stick up to these people, it is like we are promoting social acceptance for racism. The people who are being racist are reinforced in their ways when nobody says something to shoot them down. On the other hand, if we stick up to these people they will soon realize that what they do is not the social norm and will stop. People like to be liked and if they feel that that is in jeopardy then they will change their ways. Granted they won’t be stopping their behavior for entirely the right reasons but at least it will force them to reflect and think about their values and what they believe and hopefully come to change it.
So all in all I think we owe it to the greater good to stick up and fight anything that makes anyone of us feel inferior as human beings just because of the color of our skin.

Unfortunately, I do believe it hard to relearn not only racial ideas but any idea that’s been instilled in us since we were little. I mean think about the video we saw in class with the children being asked to choose between the white and black doll. Most had chosen the white doll, even the black children. I first thought that the kids would choose the doll that looked most like them, but the black children immediately grabbed for the white doll while calling the black doll “bad” and sadly acknowledging that it looks like them.
So, somehow, we are taught at an extremely young age that white is beautiful. Even if you have parents that make every effort to teach their children to be colorblind and that we are all the same regardless of the color of our skin, kids still run into racism outside the home and learn it that way. The media, as we all know, doesn’t help either as we discussed the abundance of white characters in cartoons and Disney movies.
In our discussion group we also talked about hard it is to change people’s minds. It is very much near impossible unless a very significant event happens in someone’s life that gives them an epiphany. So, even though most of us know how wrong racism is and are told again and again and shown all kinds of evidence of what racism does and how stupid it is, it is hard to fully get rid of such embedded ideas because they have been there (whether or not we full acknowledged) for as long as we can remember.
But don’t get me wrong, I do not believe it to be impossible to relearn racial ideas and change for the better. It is really depressing for me to believe that people can’t change, because how can humanity to improve if they truly can’t change. But I just think that it is hard to shake beliefs that are from your childhood.
So I do believe it is possible to relearn racial ideas, but the crucial point I want to make is that I think if the only way that people can relearn racial ideas is if they have an open mind and an open heart. If change is not welcome, then and only then is it impossible to change anything. People also have to be willing to acknowledge that they are racial even if it is at the most subconscious level. I think that’s what’s great about a class like Sam’s because it makes us realize that most of us are racist in some ways. So if we acknowledge this, then we people can move forward to relearn racial dieas.

In my economics class my senior year in high school, I specifically remember having the classic debate: does money buy you happiness? The class was split pretty much 50-50, and man did it get heated in there. The people that were on the ‘hell yes’ side thought the people on the ‘no’ side were complete idiots. To them it was as simple as “When I buy an ice cream cone, I’m happy, so money bought me happiness”. To the people on the ‘no’ side, the side I was on by the way, it was much more complex than that. Life is more complex than that. Human beings, for certain, are much more complex than that.
That’s why it makes perfect sense to me when I see articles like this one on CNN that people who win the lottery wish it never happened to them. People think that the lottery is the ultimate quick fix, the shortcut to happiness. But soon enough people realize it doesn’t and then they are left puzzled. After 40 minutes of heated debate I my economics class and we realized we were literally never going to agree on this issue, we started to discuss why we could never agree, and we came up with something interesting. We concluded that it is basically because each of us has very different definitions of happiness. What happiness literally means to you can determine what it would take to make you happy. I agree to a certain extent, but I honestly lean more towards the side that the definition of happiness is more universal than most people think.
In short, I think happiness is a balance of every aspect of our lives. Think about it, if we have everything else in our lives going for use, a great job, stable finances, loving family, nice place to live, but our love life is out of whack, we are not going to be happy. Likewise if everything in our lives except our finances was stable, then and only then do I believe could money “buy” happiness. But if your finances are fine (meaning you’re not poor) and you just went through a bad break up, you can buy things all you want and it may feel like it’s helping, but at the end of the day you are still sleeping alone. No amount of money can make trying to sleep with a broken heart suck any less.
So anyway, don’t get me wrong, if I won the lottery it’s not like I would cry and shun it away. I would be ‘happy’ and it would definitely ease a lot of worries I have for the future, but again I remind you, it would only solve the financial aspect of my life, nothing else.

The answer to this question is really very simple. I mean think about the phrase “out of sight, out of mind”. If something is not in front of your faces affecting us directly, we tend not to pay much attention to it. I mean we have enough problems on our own right? So because we don’t see pretty much any of the majority of the slavery in the world in this country anymore and because the slavery that goes in other countries is kept quiet, we tend not to think about it. We hardly ever think about where our products come from or where they go after we are done using them for that matter. We live in the moment. Immediate satisfaction. That’s pretty much it.
So how can we make people more aware of the slavery that is going on everywhere else in the world? Sam mentioned plenty of times in class that there is more slavery in the world today than there was at any point in human history, which boggles my mind and makes me extremely sad. I think for starters, the media needs to have a bigger hand in spreading the message. Let’s face it, the media is where most Americans turn to get information on what’s going on in the rest of the world, and how often do you see a breaking news report or primetime Dateline special on slavery? Not very often. So I think that if the media was not afraid in exposing this issue for what it is, people would be more aware and more willing to take action to stop it.
But as far as us individually and what we can do to spread the word about slavery and how we can take action against it, I think word of mouth is one of the best tools we have to do that. If all of us that are taking this class and that have been exposed to this issue spread the word, imagine how much awareness would increase in our community. And it has to start somewhere, so if we keep it up eventually the word spreads all over. And with the Internet now that can’t be any easier to do. Not many of us can go to the Ivory Coast and take direct initiative there to stop slavery, but if we are all at least aware of it here we can take steps here to make it better for our suffering brothers and sisters overseas. Even if it is just buying fair trade chocolate.
So that’s all I am really able to come up with. It’s so hard with issues like these because like I said they are so far out of sight that we tend not to pay attention to it. And we just have to remind ourselves that if it was our fellow Americans being whipped into slavery, wouldn’t we want the rest of the world to care?

When I think about my life today and where I am and how I got here, I know that for all technical purposes it was a mixture of determinism and free will that got me here at Penn State pursuing a teaching degree. However, I can’t help but think that even though I would like to think the majority of it was my own free choice that it actually was more determinism that allowed me to succeed.
I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, a really nice upper-middle class area. We had every store and restaurant imaginable no more than 5 minutes away from us, and I grew up in a four bedroom home with a gigantic backyard. I went to public school but a very good one, mostly white affluent kids. Only a handful was on free or reduced lunches. My high school was pretty academic, it was actually considered kind of uncool if you blew off schoolwork or didn’t do well. Even the popular kids were popularly partly because they did well in school.
I also had the typical father who stressed school and the importance of education so much. He grew up in a poor village in Egypt and came to American and became a nuclear pharmacist. The typical American dream. So naturally he wanted me to succeed, so he was definitely on me about every grade on every report card. B’s pretty much stood for ‘bad’.
In high school I had a 4.3 GPA and I worked constantly. It was like getting the A was the most important thing to me. But here’s the thing..when I think back I ask myself why I was like that and the number one answer I can come up with was because my dad basically conditioned me to think getting straight A’s was the key to life. But, I also know that it is important to me to do well in school for my own sake.
So it is a mixture of the two, but I guess there is no real way of knowing if I would have made the same choices or began to care about doing well in school if my dad hadn’t made me feel like I had no choice in the matter. I am thankful that he pushed me because if I hadn’t succeeded in high school I would have never been to able to come to Penn State which I have come to love very much. But I also think I am moving towards making the choice not to beat myself up about grades so much as I get older. There is just so much more important things in life then what grade you got in Chem 110.
In the end, Sam’s right. Determinism and free pretty much go hand in hand in shaping who we are and who we become.

I have definitely asked myself this question many times, especially since I have been part of so many conversations about race lately. It’s like...will there ever be a time in the future when we won’t feel the need to talk about race? Ideally, I would love it if race was not an issue at all in the future. Realistically, though, my gut tells me that race will be an ongoing issue far into the future.
I hate to be so pessimistic. I just feel that as long as people look differently physically, humans will always see one another differently. We have made a lot of progress, don’t get me wrong. But I think we are always going to want make sense of the differences we see in people, just like the Europeans did when they started slavery targeting black people. And the easiest way to make sense of the differences we see in humans is to associate them with the most obvious part about us: our appearances. If an African American robbed a bank and it was all over the news, people are going to be naturally inclined to think of that one bank robber every time they see a black male. It’s not right, but it’s just the way it is.
Another reason why I am pessimistic about race ever not being an issue in the future is the fact that we are all socialized into thinking differently about different people. As long as racism still exists in society, we will always be exposed to it even if it isn’t being taught in our own homes. Those who are racist will continue to teach their children stereotypes they will then try to push onto others. So even though a significant amount of us are raised not to be racist and treat everyone as equals, there will always be a need to discuss the issue of race as long as there are racist people still in the world.
The media definitely doesn’t help things as well. Just as it doesn’t help the issue of eating disorders in teenage girls by displaying unrealistically skinny girls at all times, it doesn’t help that there are openly racist remarks and jokes made on public television and most of the actors and actresses are white and European looking. As long as that is still going on, race will always be an issue that we will need to discuss.
Maybe if we WERE all able to live like monkeys, we would be able to live life without the issue of race. Unfortunately, however, we were given brains able to reason on a level so high and complex that living like monkeys is simply impossible. We will always be trying to make sense of the world we are in and each one of us go about it in a different way. I hope one day we can all just be the “human race” and if I’m not here for that, hopefully my kids will be.

I went to a high school in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA. It was one of the whitest places you will ever see. They weren’t what most people would consider “rednecks” or “hicks” or anything like that, they were all just simply white. So the first time I was ever exposed to this whole phenomenon of people of the same race kind of “sticking together” was in my high school. There were only a few African American kids, and sure enough they only socialized with one another in a very tight and exclusive group. I actually didn’t think much of it at the time because I guess it just sort of made sense.
But now that I am older and I am involved in all kinds of conversations about race I can reflect on this issue. And being at a university full of many, many different races and still seeing this exclusive grouping between races definitely makes me wonder why it happens as well.
I guess the only explanation I can come up with is that people generally like to hang out with people who are most like them. I mean we do it with every aspect of our lives, not just race. We tend to gear towards others who like the same movies, music, have the same enemies, etc. So the same goes for people of the same race. They share similar cultures which can be a huge part of a person’s life. They don’t really have to explain to one another why they have such strict parents or the food they eat because they already know. That can serve as a major comfort for minorities especially.
I also think it is a mistake for us to think that these groups of kids are choosing to stick together for the malicious reasons. I don’t think they do it because they hate whites or any other race besides themselves. And I also don’t even think a major reason they do it is because they often feel discriminated against if they try to venture into different racial groups, although I am sure it is part of it. I just think they do it because that is where they feel the most comfortable. I mean if I think about it, if I was forced to move to a different country with a culture and language completely different from my own and I just so happened to come across another American in the same situation as me, he or she would probably become my best friend. Everyone, no matter what race, is walking around this world always seeking acceptance, and the easiest way we receive acceptance is when we hang out with those who are similar to us. I honestly think it is as simple as that.