This semester I’ve learned a lot about illegal immigration as I’ve worked towards earning my Latino Studies minor. The thing my other class has emphasized that this class hasn’t is the difficult journey many of them go through to get here. The immigrants who are here are not lazy people… they are some of the hardest working people in this country. If you’re looking for the stereotypical “lazy Mexican” you most likely won’t find him in this country as an illegal immigrant. They go through tremendous danger and difficulty to get through the southern border and into an American city to find work. And then they’re extremely selfless people as well since many of them send most of what they earn back to their families in Latin America. I have gained tremendous respect for the immigrants, especially the illegal immigrants, in this country over the past couple of months. Which is why seeing the video of the guy who feeds other immigrants made me feel really happy. Because he understands how hard they work and the help they require to make it through their situation. I would like to think that if I were an immigrant I would want to help other immigrants. I think anyone who has been through such a difficult journey would have sympathy for others who have made the same journey. This leads me to believe that those who wish to close the door behind them are natural born “immigrants”… those being probably the children of immigrants, people who were born here and therefore see their parents or family of deserving the fruits of this country but not others. They worry about the other immigrants making it more difficult for their family to get the limited resources they see around them. I think being scared for your residency makes you more aware of what can be taken away from you and that’s why they feel like other immigrants would be detrimental to their livelihood and security here. After my reality got shaken by the new facts brought to light by these 2 classes talking about illegal immigrants it amazes me what many Americans have accepted as fact about undocumented workers. Many people here have a completely wrong perception of what is going on. They see illegal immigrants as a MAJOR problem.. when really the problem holds way less weight. Illegal immigrants are necessary for our economy. Not because they’re illegal but because of the work they do. People thinking they mooch off our land without giving anything back have turned a blind eye to important facts. I wish more people could understand the truth. And that being said, I would help other illegal immigrants because it would make me feel like a bad person to just be like everyone else who has the wrong idea about illegals and treat them unfairly.

The main reason I think multiculturalism is a good thing is because it forces people to accept those who are different. Or maybe that's too forward.. it forces them to experience people who are different and be around people who are different. It keeps people from easily sticking inside a particular bubble that would lead them to become very unaccepting of differences in human beings. Multiculturalism at least opens people's eyes to how others can be different and still be human. I feel like those who live in a very nondiverse community and stay there, never leave, never experience people outside of those who are exactly like them, if those people ever came across a middle eastern woman with a head covering they would have a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that she is just as human as they are.. she has a beating heart and a working brain too. I'm definitely generalizing here, and I realize it may not be the case. But I know that for me.. people who were different didn't feel real when I was growing up because of the white community I was in. It was from a child's perspective of course but seeing people of different races felt like seeing aliens. When I came to college, I didn't know how to act around people of different races figuring they were so different. But now that I've studied abroad and opened my mind I've found there's nothing better about this country than the multiculturalism that exists in it. It makes for an interesting life, getting to experience so many other cultures without ever leaving a city. It makes the American culture unique to have so many cultures within it.

Becoming "Humanitarian" is the MOST anyone could ever ask for. I feel like falling into that one step below is still an amazing accomplishment and more than most people ask of those around them. I feel like even without feeling the urge to help everyone around them regardless of their race, to be able to have sympathy for every race and treat everyone with respect is more than many of the mere mortals on this planet can say.
What I find myself wondering is what to call myself if I have sympathy and respect for everyone regardless of race but I have more of an urge to help those who are NOT in my racial class.
I also realized in my discussion group that I didn't really fully awaken to the differences in races until I got to college. My hometown is so white that while I did end up figuring out that there were different races, I didn't come across extreme stereotypes and racism until I reached college. I feel like the "Awakening" stage can be a prolonged thing. And while I answered "no" when Sam asked if we had experienced a racist or homophobic slur while being at Penn State, I still feel like I came into more racism here than anywhere else. I think it was my opening up to different media, such as sit coms on TV (which I wasn't allowed to watch while I was under my mother's roof) and Comedy Central (I didn't grow up with this channel) and also being around people who are from more racist neighborhoods that would make more racist jokes. I knew we were different when I was in school, but I didn't realize HOW different people could be until college. But I also feel like my racially underscored childhood led me to get over the differences I discovered more easily. Since I grew up assuming people were just people then when I got here it was hard to un-think that. Which is why I like to say that I easily climbed up to the 2nd to last level.
But, like the guy in this video says, I'm still inclined to help some races over others. Not because I don't like the other races, but because I feel i have a natural sympathy towards certain ones. This class is definitely helping me realize that, and realizing it is half of the battle. But I still consider myself a really good person and far beyond many others because of my comfort with races and people of different backgrounds. And to reiterate what I said in my first paragraph, being this way, and that means not being humanitarian, is still a huge accomplishment.

This question makes me wonder if I've succeeded in being as accepting a person as I wish to be only because it made me wonder if I've really changed the way I perceive different races from what I learned as a child. I grew up in a very white neighborhood and so it seems there was an underlying message in my community that anyone who isn't white is weird, different.. not like "us". My mom is a very accepting person and taught us how bad racism is, but it was hard to ignore the slight comments of my community members. And also she's a social worker in a city, so I always imagined her patients being poor, black, crazy people. So I don't think I grew up thinking people of other colors were "bad" per say, but I grew up thinking they were very different from myself. When I got to college I made a point of trying to get to know people of different races to explore whether they were really so different from myself. It wasn't my goal freshman year or anything, I'm pretty sure I had an aversion to different races freshman year, but as I spent more time here I became more eager to find out if they're really so different. Now, as a senior with many experiences behind me, I can honestly say I'm completely comfortable with people of all races as long as they have a /personality/ that i'm comfortable with. What I'm trying to say is that it's the personality of a person I now am attracted to speaking with instead of what color or background they are.
That story being said, I think it's very possible to change a young adults perceptions of race. I think children don't have the benefits of having many experiences and meeting many people. And it's difficult for them to take a good example and generalize it to a mass of people they've already experienced being "bad". I believe children are more likely to be colorblind until someone expresses to them the differences in races, and once that bubble's popped it's hard to go back. But I feel they can easily relearn if they have the desire to (which is a key factor though).

This conversation definitely brought up some of my latent prejudice that I never knew existed. Like Laurie said, we don't know it's there until something brings it to our eyes... and all along in class I've felt that I've overcome many prejudices that other people in the class are probably struggling with, until we started talking about poor white society.
I honestly hadn't thought of rednecks as an impoverished part of our country until he changed the term "rednecks" into "poor whites" and then I started to see how much disliking them and having an unwillingness to help them was racial prejudice, even though I'm white.
I see myself as a very caring, humanitarian person. After college I want to work with social services that help relieve people in poverty... which now scares me because I hadn't realized how prejudice I was/am towards poor white people and that's the line of work I've chosen.
My dad's side of the family is HUGE, and my grandpa worked 3 jobs and my grandma didn't work. Money was always tight, and many of my dad's brother's and sisters didn't have the drive to better their situation like my dad did. He got out, but some of my aunts and uncles and my cousins are white trash. They're not as bad off as Tammy is, but my grandma lived out her elderly years in a trailer park and that's where we went for family holidays. I watched my cousins waste away their lives and get pregnant at 16 and instead of giving me more sympathy for people like them it has made me almost completely NON sympathetic. Maybe it's because I saw my Dad and a few of his bros and sisters get out of that poverty and didn't feel bad for those who didn't? Or maybe because I spent my entire childhood trying to prove I was better and therefore deserved more attention than my million and 1 cousins? I don't know. But I have little sympathy.
This class is opening my eyes to that though. I'm now able to apply our conversation about determinism vs choice to an aspect of my life I haven't looked at very hard and I'm glad for that because It'll make me a better humanitarian worker to realize that all of the sympathy I have for inner-city colored poor people should be extended to the other HALF of the impoverished community, poor, rural, whites.

At first I was really confused by the king of the mountain bit but plenty amused by the fact my professor was standing on a table. While I still don't know how to play king of the mountain and still don't understand how it would normally be played I think Sam's point got across to me. He meant that at one point in time a certain population of people were able to find their way to the top of the mountain, and since they were there they had control over how close to them the other people got. The way white people seem to have excelled absorbantly in the United States. Back during the Mexican American War (which many people don't know much about because our high school history classes have chosen to skip over how terrible a time period that was for our country image wise) many Latinos were terrified of the United States intervening in their affairs at all because of our history with the treatment of other races. We exterminated the Indians, we enslaved the blacks and then we stole from the Mexicans. After that war we owned half of their land and all of the native peoples in them and then told them to be "American". Today, we consider those with Indian, African, and Mexican backgrounds inferior and subordinate because they don't fit in with "American culture". Personally I'm really glad the cultures that came with such diverse populations didn't become completely Americanized! They're so much more interesting than dry white culture. Even my Catholic Irish ancestry is more interesting than that of dry English protestants. So I'm glad that we have those people in our country and I think we should work harder at letting them up the mountain. Yes, this means I'm all about affirmative action and policies like it, because I want to make up for what degrading policies were made less than 100 years ago that many people aren't even fully educated about today.

A topic kind of like this got brought up in my discussion group this week and the reason I mention it is I feel the answers are the same. The question in group was when is it ok to call someone of a different race a name that they only call each other, like the term "nigga", when is it ok and not ok for a white person to use that term. And that applies to this video... If a black person gets on stage and makes jokes about blacks being "lazy niggas" people would laugh, but if a white comedian said the same thing people would cringe.
It's unfortunate to me that this is the case because it proves that as a society we are far from being over the race issue.
But the fact of the matter is you can only comfortably make fun of your kind or else people wonder if you're making fun. This equates to girls calling each other hoes and sluts, but as soon as a guy calls a girl a hoe you wonder if he's teasing too or if he's just plain being disrespectful.
I truly believe each generation brings a new, higher level of respect for different races with it. And some day people will listen harder to the tone of how someone says something rather than just by their race and which race they're saying something about. The tone is where it's at. That's the way to tell if someone's joking around and teasing, not meaning any harm, and being malicious.
So I pose another question for anyone who would like to think about it. If I'm a white dude and I tell my black friend that he's a "lazy nigga" am I racist? Why do people think that would make me a racist? Because I'm not. I love that guy. I say it as a gesture of friendship, because if we weren't friends he would probably kick the crap out of someone who said it. I'm going to ask him why he would do that though, because if someone else said it as a joke he should just take it as a friendly gesture as well.

I'm going to start with mentioning that I'm a practicing Catholic... because we're usually perceived as a strict and traditional denomination.

The first time I heard God referred to as a She was on my pastoral administrator's home voice mail, and I loved it. It took me by surprise, but if you knew my PA then you would understand that the surprise was only at hearing something I had never heard before, not that she said it. (I wasn't surprised that it was her I heard it from since she's a very strong individual)
It got me thinking then, as hearing it again from Sam did again, how different the world would be if God had been written in the Bible as a woman. If I stop to consider it for too long it makes me angry at the stupidity of history because the bloodiest and most socially irrisponsible actions were mainly all revolved around God being a MAN.
It's the reason men took such power in society! Women for AGES were deprived of what we consider now basic human rights. And today they are continually seen as subjective, submissive, and unimportant all because religion says MEN were made in HIS likeness.
If throughout history HUMAN BEINGS were made in HER likeness then women would have been treated with so much more respect. They would have had a say in important matters. Look at pagonism. Since they believed some of their gods were women the women of that society got far more respect than the women of ours and decisions took different turns typically than the decisions that shaped our European history. This is slightly sexist I know.. but men tend to think in actions, instead of feelings. They tend to act first and think of consequences later. And women naturally are opposite of that.

In my opinion God is more like a she than a he. But being brought up in the Catholic faith where we're led almost completely by men it's really hard for me to switch over to thinking of God as a she. I want to, but it's like.... trying to think of all men as women and all women as men. I don't know a better metaphor for it but it's extremely difficult even though I see more similarities between what I know about God and my mother than what I know and my father. I wish there was a way to have God be a being instead of a gender, but that's difficult as well. And SHE knows that one of the last churches that would ever let go of the image of God as a man is the Catholic one. (Let's get female priests first!)

Sam's lecture thursday about why people have different features seriously blew my mind. I'm really not an over judgemental person about people's features and between my mother, my adult female friends, and my current female friends I've become a person very accepting of all features and body types. And yet... Sam still was able to open my mind even further by his talk about how everyone's features are perfect because they are the attributes that allowed our ancestors to survive. That's an amazing way to think when I look at people and how different they all appear.
For an example, I used to see most asian-esque people as almost the same. My experience with asian friends is Korea, China and Japan, so if I ever really tried to categorize any asians I attributed them to one of those countries. But the video on "all asians look the same" made me realize that I was thinking that way and how they're just as different as all white groups.

Which brings me to my direct response to this video. I'm white (I wish I was latino haha but sadly I am not). And this white girl is a mix of Irish, German, English and Scottish. There's prob more, but those are my main ones. I'm straight up a whitey mutt child.
I would say the similarities I find between myself and others that identify with any of those countries (other whitey mutt children) are our crazy blue or green and generally very light colored eyes; our pale skin with rosey undertones; a blonde undertone to our hair (even if it's now brown); medium to tall height in both male and female.
Such generalizations, and I know I don't have much back up evidence. But that's how I would answer this question.

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