The videos were very shocking to me. I didn’t even think of the extremes that our soldiers’ do, and those were definitely the extremes, and seeing those videos is a valid reason for other countries hating us so much. With that being said, that was only a few soldiers going to the extreme, we don’t get a chance to see every soldier out there and what they are doing. I feel that as if we are not the only soldiers to act like that. We see other countries doing things like that and they see us doing the same. But you know what angers me, is that those soldiers are fighting for our country and stepping up and doing the things not all of us have the guts to do. I mean we didn’t see the whole video so how do we know that something before it was on film didn’t make it happen.
From another perspective, the people they harmed could’ve been innocent bystanders, and if they were, then what was done was absolutely horrible. That was the one thing that man had going for him and to see it ripped to shreds for no reason was heartbreaking. Sam asked us to step outside ourselves and pretend we were Muslims living in Iraq. Watching those videos imagining myself as one of them really did make the American soldiers seem like invaders. It makes one understand why they hate us so much. They are frightened by the day-to-day things they see. They are frightened by the way we treat their men-not their combatants-their regular civilian men. I can’t help but think if I was a little kid living in Iraq and saw the way the Americans treated their land I would be traumatized. You can’t judge an entire army by the actions of a few. Sure, I feel anger toward those American soldiers and I have every right to. The fact is that what they did was rash and wrong. What I think need to be done is that these actions need to be recognized and scolded. American soldiers need to be taught about how to act toward these innocent civilians. It seems like a ridiculous thing to teach, but if tanks are being used to destroy a civilian’s only source of income then I feel it is completely necessary.
All I can say is that I understand. I understand why they hate us. I understand why they fight us. Thousands of their kids, wives, parents, husbands have been killed by what naturally belongs to them. The oil has sat underneath their feet forever. Do we have the right to just take it? They do not think so and they are letting us know. The worst part about this whole situation is that we have sent our heroes out to fight for what is not ours and to die fighting for a goal that is not even true.

Being a freshman at Penn State, I didn’t come here knowing much except that the school had a good football program and also was very academic. I have learned so much about Penn State these past few weeks then I ever anticipated. We have so many different aspects to our university then just what I thought. Seeing our community come together as one from the candle vigil to the Blue Out football game made me realize what this school really is.
These past few weeks have been rough for Penn State, something that I have taken from it all is that you never really can know someone. Sandusky covered up all of his bad with all of the charities and things he would do for the boys. Some people looked at him for inspiration because of the things he did for the Second Mile program. Lesson learned is that no matter what they have done or for how long every human is capable of making a wrong decision or a wrong act, especially when in a high position of power when it is believed it can be easily covered up. However, I think this goes to show that no matter what the crime or no matter how much power you have the truth always and always will be revealed.
Overall, I think the most crucial thing I have learned is the ability to love our community and the ability to move on. Yes, it will be hard at times thinking about the various events that happened and the possible consequences still yet to come but it is all we can do now. Nothing good will come out of dwelling upon it, so as the Penn State community we are we need to do our best as a whole to help those in need and start the rebuilding process. WE ARE all Penn State and ARE all the many great things that we have accomplished.
Penn State scandal is that titles are just titles, and procedure should not mean a thing when a person’s life is being abused in front of your face and on your watch. Although the colleagues of Sandusky did follow legal procedure, they were not nearly as urgent as they should have been to put a stop to his abuse. In my eyes when people, especially children, are being victimized it should not matter if you are the President of the United States, a student, or homeless, you have a moral obligation as a human being to stop it. We need to stand together, regardless of our different opinions on the surrounding individuals involved, and support the victims of abuse. Penn State is so much more than Jerry Sandusky and the tipping over of a news van. These events have taught me to not label a group based upon the actions of just a few members of that group.
The last and most important thing I learned from this was to take pride in my university and my education. We need to stay respectful of one another’s opinions, and we need to stand together. We can all agree, what happened to those young boys was horrific.

This scandal has definitely had a lot of negative activity on our university and even me personally. A lot of people refer to Penn State as their home away from home and have huge pride in where we go to school. We literally had the best reputation out there, from our student section, to our job recruiting, to how we always come together as a whole. But after all of this, things have never been so chaotic.
I have had friends from other states ask me "Are you getting maced right now? How are the riots? etc." Then others are just straight up insulting, I saw several statuses referring to us as “rapists” or “sex predators”. This clearly isn’t us, and it sucks that the actions of a few people can affect 40,000 others. If my friends are saying these things to me, I cannot even imagine what strangers are saying.
The media has blown everything so out of proportion that it's disgusting, my stomach literally hurts when thinking about it and what one man is putting the whole university through. Sandusky's actions cannot define our whole university, and sadly, the media is making him do just that. The world is now thinking of us as corrupt and immoral as a whole, instead of just looking at the few individuals who did something so cruel. People are also seeing about 5% of penn state students rioting but what about the ones who weren’t, no one sees that. The media has been invading our personal space for days on days now and we are tired of it. Everyone thinks that we are only rioting about Paterno getting fired, this is true. But the victims are also in our thoughts, we are having a candle light vigil tonight in honor of the victims. A small group of students gathered outside of Joe Paterno’s house and also at the Joe Paterno statue outside Beaver stadium. They stood next to the statue and shouted positive messages to Joe and Sue while protecting them from the obnoxious media. This is something that was not highlighted simply because it gives negative attention to the media, therefore they don’t show it.
The thing that I am hopeful for is that Penn State will be able to grow and thrive despite this scandal. Maybe instead of being just a football school, we can put more pride into our academics and our philanthropy. We are more than just a football school, we are thon, we are the number one job recruiters and more. In my ideals, this school is almost ideal. Everyone has heard of Penn State, but now this scandal is what they will be thinking of when they hear of it. We have to build ourselves and our university back up from this.

I think that sometimes Americans have too much pride in who we are, this is not always a bad thing. But when it comes to jobs we are. We have so much more opportunities to go to college, get a degree, and get a job that will be able to support us. So we usually take advantage of those opportunities if we can. When looking at the world around us, we see how successful people are and we strive to be like that too. When seeing the working conditions immigrants go through we think of how much we don’t want to be in that situation and that we would never want to work in those conditions because we think we are better than that.
When immigrants do this hard labor, they are paid like half of what we would expect to get paid. The situation in their country is so bad (obviously that’s why they are here) that it is worth it to them to work. American citizens need to be humble and start realizing that it is not a God given right to have a job. You need to work your way up sometimes, so just stop being so lazy. Most of our ancestors had to go through rough times working tough jobs and our genes survived. People in today’s world are all so weak. This generation needs to become tougher or we are in trouble. In my opinion, everyone in the United States should experience a manual labor job at least once in his or her lifetime.
Another thing to think about is the immigrants who are working in these farming jobs are not any regular old immigrants. The immigrants crossing the border are often illegal immigrants. Technically, these people have no identities, no rights, and no legally bound reason to be here. Therefore, they cannot produce any legal documents to work in a place like McDonald’s, which also pays minimum wage and provides air conditioning, a roof, and free food for breaks.
American citizens, no offense, are just straight up lazy. Most people that complain about not having jobs and immigrants do are because they haven’t gotten off their lazy ass to do anything about it. In my opinion, these immigrants work harder and for less because they do not know when their next opportunity to get money will be, and their families back home are always what keeps them going. They also know that their families are depending on them to send back money since without them, there is no chance of obtaining a better life. At the end of the day, immigrants work harder because their opportunities to get paid are so much less than for the rest of Americans.

I feel that hanging out with people of different races does not make you a poser, but when you change yourself to act like a group of people that then makes you a poser. A lot of people hang out with others because of common interests, location, school, family friends and many more reasons. To be bluntly honest, a lot of people don’t get to choose their friends; people hang out with people who are, what’s the word, convenient. With that being said, here is an example, we are all students here at Penn State and I am sure that we could be friends with at least 20,000 people here, but in reality when are we going to be around these potential friends…almost never. But I am friends with people on my floor or people in clubs because that is where I was placed. If I was in Stone Hall rather than Bigler Hall I wouldn’t even know the names of people that I do now. So therefore I literally cannot choose my friends.
Personally I think it is awesome when people hang out with other races because they are stepping out of their comfort zone and learning about different races and ethnicities.
I have a very diverse friend group, but I can promise you I’m not a poser. A poser to me is someone who changes his or her actions to be like another. It pisses me off when white people act like “thugs” or “gangsters” and get shit for it by being called wangsters. So pretty much we are saying only black people can act like that? That’s what we are all implying anyways. Maybe people act like a wangsters because they grew up in an urban school. It just amazes me how people can jump to conclusions. I mean really we don’t know why that person dresses or acts like that, but who cares.
In our small discussion groups, I get to hear the opinions and beliefs of student of different races. I find that I agree with a lot of these things other students are saying. If we think about it, we have the same goals, attitudes, and beliefs about many of life’s biggest issues. Because of this, it is interesting why more people do not have friends of a different race. We are all very similar to one another and someone of a different race could be more like you than someone of your own race. However, people like to stick to what is comfortable for them. Since I am white and have been surrounded by mostly white people my whole life, it is only natural that I am more comfortable being around white people today. This is the same for people of all races.

I am not a fan of labels, but who can say they are. Even though we all agree that they are unnecessary, we all continue to use them unconsciously. I know that I use them quite often to attempt to describe a person, and I don’t even think about it. When I refer to a person’s race I am usually trying to describe them and what they look like so the person I am talking to can get a vivid picture in their minds. If I was in a store and some “black” people were yelling at each other then I would start the story as, “These black people”, I would do the same for Latinos, Asians, etc. But now that I come to think of it if I was telling a story about white people I wouldn’t state that they are white, I can’t think of why this happens. My only guess is because in this century, people are so common to being told what race they are discussing if the race isn’t white, and if a race isn’t mentioned then most people just assume the race is white or Caucasian.
I think something else that plays a role in this is how we are raised and taught to label people. I mean adults do this just as unconsciously as kids or teens do.
Are racial labels necessary? Absolutely not. But the simple answer is that until race is a part of our world, they will always be used. We as human beings often need to identify ourselves with a certain gender, culture, race, ethnicity, etc. We need to belong to a bigger group and by doing this we automatically exclude ourselves into a group of people that have similar characteristics to us. By doing this, we then feel the need to use racial labels to describe the people who don’t belong to our group. Just like in one of Sam’s articles in the Shadowbox he questioned, “Why can’t we refer to ourselves as just humans?” It’s a great question actually, but we cant because to do that we would have to first except one another and everyone for what they look like, and in my opinion that isn’t going to happen anytime while we are living, and maybe it will never happen.
On that note, we really cannot say that we all look alike. We clearly don’t and have different characteristics. At this day in age, I don’t see the problem with labeling people by race; I mean would we rather label someone as a slut or a thug. We should be proud of what we are born with, even though at time we believe that racial levels are wrong, we need to except them because until we find something that is different about people other than our races, we will continue to be labeled as accordingly.

The bike thieves video we watched in class I think caused a mutual reaction within most of the class and that was just shocked and we all laughed, when in reality there was nothing funny about the matter. I never realized how racist and/or sexist people can really be, but in an indirect way.
The main two victims (the white “hoodlum” and the black “hoodlum”) caused the biggest reaction in the classroom. The main thing that made this experiment successful was they made sure that the two actors dressed alike and acted alike in numerous ways so that the only difference would be the color/race of the individuals. Even though these two actors had a lot in common they caused extremely different reactions to the general public as they used power tools to get a bike chain off of a bike. As the white actor did this he admitted to the public it wasn’t his bike and over one hundred people of various races walked right past him without taking any action. An elderly couple finally decided to take action and call for help. But as the colored actor used the same power tools as well as admit to the general public that is was not his bike, people were on him like white on rice. Almost every bystander stopped and either asked or took pictures and called for help right away, almost no hesitations.
When the woman was stealing the bike it was really easy to predict what was going to happen. Being a woman can get you out of a lot of things, think about it, how many girls have said they have gotten out of a speeding ticket or something with the law. Women can easily play things off because really we can just act so dumb and clueless about anything and get away with saying “Oh but sir, I didn’t know.” But females cannot pull this trick on other females because we know the loopholes women use because we are women so they wont get away with it then.
Individuals are judged and discriminated against based on appearance/skin color all the time. Whether it’s in the workforce, school, or everyday life, certain people have unfair advantages over others due to stereotypes. These predetermined judgments about people specifically based on their skin color wrongly affects our society all the time. The thing that comes to my mind is how many things to people in America get away with everyday, especially women. People are willing to go to any extreme to get what they want, and a lot of people probably get lee way with things because they think they can pawn it off on other people or they can get away with it because of their race or sex.

Haiti is a very poor country to begin with, and after the natural disaster of the four hurricanes that hit the Haitians country it only got worse. Destroying many lives, homes, crops and more. I viewed of few of the entrepreneur’s videos and it hit me how much they really struggled. I mean I never realized what the definition of “poor: was until seeing what the entrepreneurs must do to make a living.
I really enjoyed the videos about the purses, shirts, jewelry, and pictures frames. I would like to throw it out there that I would definitely be interested in buying some of those things not only to help Haiti, but because I really think that it would be neat to describe how I got them and also how hard the people work to make them.
For Clorene Blaise and her clothes manufacturing business, I noticed a lot of things that she lacked. She has to use a silk screening machine, which after awhile runs on the shirt and fades away. She would like to obtain a printing machine for better quality designs. She also lacked workers because of the space of her shop. She can’t fit any more workers in it, and would therefore need a bigger work space. One of the main things she wants is her own tag to put on the shirts. I think it would be so awesome to create a tag for her shirts. We could be so creative. I think my group could come up with different designs to put on the tag or even what material it could be.
Another entrepreneur that stuck out to me was Manouchka, she believes that accessorizing is fun and accessories are fun to make, I have to agree with her on this one. She started with only herself and now has two employees, but she would like more. She makes jewelry and photo frames from scratch and designs them herself, using scissors to carve and an oven to shape. I think a great way to help her get her business to flow more could be to make bracelets, picture frames, or earrings from materials we have over here and possibly show her how to make them. Considering that our materials are a lot more affordable for us, we could make bracelets out of strings and beads or earrings out of Coke bottle caps. We just have to let our imagination go wild and to the extreme.
I am really excited to get started on this project and see everyone’s different ideas. Together we all can make a difference, even if it’s only changing lives for a few people, it’s one or two less people that have less stress or obstacles thanks to something we did.

There are many ways to classify yourself and also many influences on how we classify ourselves making this question very difficult to answer. When we classify ourselves, we can do so by our race, hair color, extracurricular activities, language, ethnicity, religion, and the list goes on. Some of these classifications are not chosen by us, but by those around us.
When it comes to my race I classify myself as white or Caucasian. This is a classification that I literally had no control over whatsoever. This classification was technically picked by my parents, but still they did not have complete control over it either. They figured I would be white, coming from an all white family.
My religion classifies me as a Roman Catholic; this is something I can control. I was born and raised a Catholic my whole life and I am happy with that. I can turn around and change this classification to anything I want, I could be atheist or Baptist, but I am particularly choosing to be this religion because this is what my family is and therefore they have an influence on this classification.
My gender is female, this is completely chosen by fate. Technology now provides us with ways to change our sex, but I find that extremely foolish. Like Lady Gaga said, “I was born this way.” Kind of the same concept, we should flaunt how we are and what we have.
My sexual orientation is straight, our sexual orientation on the other hand is not the same as choosing our gender, I believe that sexual orientation is not a choice, but how people are born. People sometimes classify to their sexual orientation, and they get ridiculed so why would anyone choose to live a life of that.
The thing I mostly classify myself as is a rugby player, I don’t know why but I love telling people I am. I feel that rugby is the freest thing in my life and it’s the one classification I have most influence over and I enjoy telling people that I play it. Sports have always been a big part of my life and have grown on me ever since I was young. I enjoy classifying myself as an athletic person because I feel that can be an admirable trait; it also makes me feel a part of something.
Classifying ourselves isn’t just about what we are classified by, but who influences our classifications. A lot of people would think that letting people influence your classification as a bad thing, but in reality it is happening all the time whether we want to believe it or not, and at times its nice to have a little insight from the people around you.

Personal preference and interracial prejudice are two topics that are very closely related but there is a line that must be drawn to distinguish one from the other. A personal preference is something or someone a person rather have over another thing or person, while interracial prejudice is having unreasonable feelings or opinions about someone’s race, ethnic background, social class, gender, and the list goes on. The example used where white men may prefer tan women to pale women is only what attracts them and what they want or desire to have, making it a personal preference. Everybody has an ideal person or persons who they are attracted to, this attraction may come from what color the other person’s skin is, but this does not classify them as prejudice. I feel that something that is a personal preference is hard to explain why it is a personal preference, when prejudice is easy to explain. For example, if someone prefers to date black men to white men and you ask them why, typically there is some kind of hesitation or there is no answer because a person’s personal preferences are controlled by their emotions and feelings and not by their own opinions or thoughts. When someone is prejudice about let’s say, Asian men and asked why, there is usually a specific reasoning for why they are prejudice and do not associate themselves with them. Even though prejudice and personal preference aren’t the same, they definitely compliment each other well. Most kids are brought up in a single race house, or what seems to be single race, and taught to only date their own race. This is an example of interracial prejudice impacting a person’s personal preference. This can lead to people thinking there is something wrong with other races if brought up in this type of lifestyle and would run into more conflicts then what they expected. Another big factor in distinguishing interracial prejudice and personal preference is a person’s religious beliefs. It seems that a lot of people these days are beginning to get more close-minded as more races are found. Race is a hot topic now in America and many people are affected by it, there are many more interracial neighborhoods, schools, and overall communities so therefore there will be more tests for people to see whether it is just a personal preference or if they are truly prejudice. Personally I prefer men of my complexion, but that does not mean that I won’t go out and be friends and socially interact with people of other races. I just know that I am personally attracted to those kinds of people. I have nothing against any other races; it is just my personal preference.