I really wanted to blog about the lecture about personal growth in race relations conversation, but I don't see any blog questions about that specifically, so this is the closest I can get, I think. I didn't think that the latent racism part of the lecture was particularly interesting, because we've covered it many, many times in class. In fact, I think that's the most important thing for people to take away from the class, because even though it's going to be impossible to eradicate completely, the first step towards equality is awareness of the latency of the issues in the first place. That’s something we have discussed many times and in many ways.

I think it’s very interesting to look back on the semester to see where we started and ended on the spectrum of race relations growth. Almost certainly all of us have progressed in some way, no matter where we began. (If you take a glance at the Twitter feed, you might think that we were all still at Stage 1, unfortunately.) I can’t exactly remember what the stages signified, but I know that I’ve personally passed through several stages during my time at Penn State. Once here, I was exposed to people from many other backgrounds – even whites from other backgrounds – which definitely started to propel me further down the path of race relations. Where am I right now? It’s difficult to self reflect in that kind of way. I want to be further along than I am. If I’m being honest, I think that I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m somewhere between being feeling extremely aware of race issues (which sometimes makes me feel falsely self-righteous) and feeling skeptical of race hypocrisy.

For example, my summer roommate of Indo-Guyanese heritage was extremely skeptical of white people. Once I made it clear that I was interested in her heritage, she was friendly, and called me her “favorite white person,” and “the only white person I like.” We had a lot of conversations about race relations, and I mostly agreed with her generalizations about white people, not just because I wanted to be “in” with her, but because I honestly felt that way about it. However, she very rarely criticized her own group – which was strange, because it was her own group whose discrimination (of her bisexual lifestyle) was the most damaging to her on a day-to-day basis. It was her own group that refused to include her or legitimize her sexuality, and even demonized her because of it. But she made no similar criticisms or critical generalizations of her people. I think this is what Sam was referring to in the “recognizing hypocrisy” stage. It’s interesting that it took me so long (basically until Sam mentioned it) to recognize her avoidance of self-criticism (of her group), even while I was so willing to engage in criticism of my own.

I think this is the best question I’ve seen on the blog so far this semester. What does it mean to sit with the problem, without shying away from it on one hand, and without trying to solve it on the other? Because what else is there, right? We don’t DO that. We don’t think that way. If we acknowledge a problem, we push it away – “sure, there are homeless people in my hometown, but they can’t be helped, they have to help themselves” – or try to solve it – “there are children with cancer whose families can’t afford their care, let’s try to help them out.” We’re really good at rationalizing and ignoring, and we’re also really good at problem solving. But we’re not often good at just thinking. And just letting ideas sit. And just feeling.

I’m not saying I’m good at it. I’ve tried to meditate and had the same problem. “Observe your thoughts, acknowledge them, but don’t pursue them.” But I can’t. I’m trained to problem-solve. I’m trained to ruminate in circles and circles. But in class, when Sam asked us to stay in the middle, to sit there, what was left was feeling. Lots of feelings, overwhelmingly anger. Some people mentioned guilt. I think the guilt happens when you’re attempting to solve the problem, and of course, failing because there is no easy or feasible solution in sight. But I think the anger and the sadness are empathetic. How would it feel if that were done to me?

There was a moment in class that was definitely an Aha moment for me. We were watching the song and video, which was already pretty powerful. There was one photograph that especially stuck out to me in the context of the song. It was a signpost, one of those blue historical markers. And it said something along the lines of, “This land was given to the Cherokee people by the government of the United States in the year…” I’ve seen those before in real life, but for some reason, in the context of the lecture, and perhaps the song as well, it just hit me in a totally new and different way. How TOTALLY ridiculous. How COMPLETELY arrogant and hubristic. Here we are, patting ourselves on the back for doing the most basic and tiny thing we possibly could have done to rectify the horrors committed in the past. Like, “look, we SAID we’re sorry. What more do you want?!”

And of course, no one’s really taking responsibility for it here, and the real crime is that no one has to. EVERYONE is doing it, so who’s going to point the finger of blame at me? "I live on Native American land, but so does everyone else, so why should I have to change?"

"Everyone gets their clothing and cell phones from corporations that blatantly abuse human rights. Why should I have to change?"

When a person of color is poorer than a white person, the narrative is that it’s because they aren’t taking the individual agency, the personal responsibility for their actions.

But when I’m asked to take personal responsibility for the stolen land I live on, the products that I use, the narrative suddenly switches. It’s out of my control. Everyone is doing it. Why do MY personal actions matter?

So in a way, Sam answered this question in Thursday’s lecture by showing how affirmative action for women benefited white men more than any other group (except the women themselves, I suppose – we didn’t really get into that at all). One of the things that I took away from that lecture was the reinforcement of the idea that most of our social and economic institutions somehow benefit white men (the individuals currently in power), even when they externally or superficially seem to intend to benefit another group entirely. But what about race-based affirmative action, for example, at Penn State? What about students who have scholarships based on their race and ethnic heritage? Are they the only people who benefit from that affirmative action?
I believe that we absolutely should support affirmative action, and this is why: the beneficiaries of affirmative action are not simply those individuals who receive tangible benefits, for example, the individual who receives a ten thousand dollar scholarship. We have our own invisible strings, but those sociological strings are also attached to the people we come into contact with, the people who have been where we have been, the people who are involved in the same institutions, and the people who lived where we live now. Those strings show that those receiving some aid through affirmative action are not the sole beneficiaries of the aid.
Imagine a black student who received her K-12 education in a Chicago public school, in a gang-ridden, and violent neighborhood. Imagine a white student who grew up in an affluent Philadelphia suburb. Now imagine that these two students have the same qualifications – comparable SAT scores, similar high school GPA’s, and comparable extra-curricular activities and leadership skills. Whose education – the black girl’s, from struggling inner-city Chicago, or the white girl’s, from an upscale Philadelphia neighborhood – is more valuable to society? Both girls are likely to bring their skills back to the people they know, and bring their economic value and academic knowledge back to their homes. For whom are the problem-solving skills and tools that come with a bachelor’s degree going to be more helpful? For one girl’s low income black neighborhood, where she is an economic and academic outlier, or the other girls’ high income white neighborhood, where she is just like every other member of the neighborhood?
Obviously, there is no guarantee that either investment will pay off. Perhaps the black girl from Chicago will become a banking executive and move to New York, leaving her roots behind, while the white girl becomes a school board administrator in Chicago, trying to make the neighborhood a better place for students. We have no way of knowing. However, it is more LIKELY that in this scenario, investing in the black girl would be helping more people, because all of the people who know her would be affected. Investing in the white girl in this case would be less likely to create an impact on society.

This lecture really personally spoke to me. Over spring break, I saw a video - "Wealth Inequality in America" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM) - that illustrates this same issue (except with scary music and more of a break down about what occurs in the topmost percentile, which is even scarier!). In fact, it's been quite on my mind ever since I spent my first significant period of time (hopefully of many over my lifetime!) in another country - Canada. Of course, where socialism is not too far from a dirty word here, in Ontario, it was embraced. When I went to the doctors' office, the receptionist couldn't comprehend that I didn't have healthcare in Canada ("But...through your school? No? Through your country?...No????"). The idea of healthcare as a costly service, rather than as a human right, was foreign.

Honestly, that’s the kind of society that I would like to live in: the kind where paying a little extra to help save your brothers’ and sisters’ lives is a no-brainer, and where having twice as much money doesn’t get you healthcare access twice as quickly. A society like the latter treats the lives of human beings with relation to their monetary value.

I understand the reasoning that people have against this. If the government can take x% of my money, the money that I earned, and can give it to someone else, what’s to stop them from taking more? Why can’t I be trusted to allocate my own money? Taxation and socialism are contrary to a lot of people’s conceptions of a “free” society. Maybe that is true. But I also think that living in a society inherently means giving up some of those free rights. We make contracts with each other so that we can live well and harmoniously. We give up the freedom to kill each other without punishment, too. Giving up the freedom to keep 100% of your earned income in order for a better society is reasonable to me.

People act like their taxed money is taken from them and handed on a platter to someone else. But it seems clear to me that everyone ultimately benefits from this system, as far as quality of life and overall happiness. Though there are many indices of happiness, some of the most socialized countries in the world – such as those in Scandinavia – consistently rank as some of the happiest and most satisfied people in the world overall. Yet they’re paying some of the highest taxes in the world. I can only conclude that the people feel that their investment in their society is being returned in a satisfactory way. I can only imagine how nice it is for poverty to be rare, to walk down a street in the nation’s biggest cities and never see people begging in the streets.

Reincarnation is considered to be weird, hippy-dippy nonsense. I wonder if part of this perception is rooted in fear. Western and Roman ideologies have strong origins in rhetoric, cause-and-effect, and individualism, and the conception of reincarnation is fundamentally opposed to these ideas. I think people characterize reincarnation as “loony” because considering it seriously would really scare them. We like to think of ourselves as fully individual, unique, autonomous beings. Thinking of ourselves as having such a close, inherent relationship with someone else – even just grasping the idea that we ourselves may not be directly responsible for all the things we do or the things that happen to us – could be an extremely uncomfortable thought.
I think it is especially interesting to contrast one particular aspect of reincarnation with the Abrahamic religions – the afterlife. At least in Islam and Christianity, your behavior in the earthly life determines your fate after you die. From what I have heard from my classmates, part of why people are so opposed to atheism is that they don’t understand the incentive to be “good” and moral for those who don’t believe that there is an afterlife. Interestingly, though Hindu reincarnation shares the belief that your behavior in this life affects what happens next, the fact that it is not an afterlife, but yet another life, still does not sit well with people. I wonder why it is perceived as so different – they seem to be two birds of the same feather to me. Perhaps people like to believe that their own unique conscience transcends their lifetime into eternity. Perhaps people are uncomfortable feeling that their lives might be very closely tied to people they don’t know and will never meet. Perhaps people like to think that humanity is so special and unique in the animal kingdom that we are not related to our animal neighbors in such a close way that we share births and deaths with them. I’m not sure which it is, but I do feel that reincarnation is not such a drastically different idea from those held by Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
I’m an atheist-leaning agnostic, but I think that I feel a little more positively about reincarnation than I think about most organized religious conjecture. Though I don’t practice a religion, I do have a strong sense of spirituality and oneness with others (whether that’s just some sort of evolved social capacity or ACTUAL spirituality, I have no idea). The spiritual foundations of reincarnation seem congruent with this idea of collectivity and interconnectedness. What I’ve seen across the world so far (although I hope to someday see much more) supports that feeling as well – across the globe, the people I have met, though they grew up in very different environments, are more the same than we are different.

So for me, these data are, more than anything, evidence of the Invisible Strings we’ve been talking about this whole time. I can’t conceive of a clearer example of how much our fates are controlled by factors outside of our control. If all races were equal in our society, as some like to argue they are, then a person of any race would be equally likely to have wealth as any other. Each socioeconomic stratus, from high to low, would contain the same ratios between races. If this were the case, we might be able to more reliably say that socioeconomic success were not correlated with race, and we might even be able to show that it’s correlated with personality, or work ethic. But as we saw, this is not the case in the US.

If one’s socioeconomic status or wealth can be predicted by their skin color, that indicates to me that it’s not just our actions that affect our lives, but also factors we can’t control – invisible strings like skin color and heritage. So then the story is an accumulation over time of the effect of one invisible string, race.

To me, it’s a similar story - or at least a story with a similar ending – as the global inequality lecture. That lecture imparted the idea that the people of some nations are poorer than others (namely our own and a few others) not because they choose to be, or because they don’t have the resources to improve their situation, but because there exists between us a relationship of power. The “story” there is a lot like Sam’s hypothetical TEDtalk about US coal and China: the nation that has the means to oppress the resource-bearing nation can do so. Isn’t that a parallel to this situation? Those who have the means to make the rules about how wealth is acquired and how resources are used will unsurprisingly be those who benefit from those rules. In the world, that has been the United States for many years. In the United States, it has been the whites.

It’s very likely that the strings coming into play here, because of race, are difficult to see. Racism isn’t always overt, and sometimes it can only be seen once many small acts of racism are accumulated across people and across time. That’s the story that I think these data tell: the story of years of accumulated racism. This is why I believe that affirmative actions are so important. If the same people continue to be in power, then this cycle never breaks, and the inequalities continue to grow.

Hi, I was really glad to see that you mentioned the documentary about the Mardi Gras beads. I had that Soc class a few years ago and watched it (it was totally heartbreaking!!) Do you remember what the documentary was called? I can't remember the title but would love to find it again...

Thinking of ourselves as "rich" is kind of like trying to imagine what an atom looks like - even though you know it's true, or that the atom's there, it's almost impossible to access and grasp in a meaningful way. I don't have a microscope that will magnify the world strongly enough to see an atom - similarly, I don't have a scope big enough to zoom out on the entire world and see myself as part of, and in relation to, that global community.

I mean, I've done all the exercises and still don't really grasp that reality. I just recently participated in Penn State's Hunger Banquet, where I learned that the world's "upper class" is essentially those living on 12 k a year and above. The world's "middle class" lives on between 900 and 12000 a year. Obviously there is a GAPING difference between the quality of life of someone living on 100k or even more as compared with someone living on 30k or even less, but they can both count themselves among the luckiest in the world. And clearly there's a huge difference between 12k and 900 dollars. But MOST of the world belongs in the last category, the world's poorest. It's hard to imagine that in a nation where we still have poverty, even the impoverished are considered more wealthy than most of the world. When I'm in this mindset, of COURSE I'm rich, of COURSE I'm wealthy, of COURSE I'm incredibly fortunate.

But all that truth doesn't feel the same to me when I see my textbook receipts, or try to find a safe place to live that I can afford. So does this perspective really change the way I interact with the world? I suppose it makes me feel fortunate that the things I think I “need” are textbooks and college classes, rather than food and clothing. But more than that, I do feel that I bear a certain responsibility to try to grasp what it is like to live in a less fortunate situation. As I said, it is extremely difficult to imagine what poverty is in relation to my wealth, and I think the only way to be empathetic to it is to seek out opportunities that remind me of my own fortune.

I'm really interested in your conclusion that "the solution lies within the countries that allow these practices to occur on their own soil", mainly because I think this directly conflicts with what I took away as one of the main points of the lecture - that what allows a lot of these atrocities to occur is power relationships between nations. We are on the powerful end of that powerful relationship, so if there's anyone that can do something about it, isn't it...us?

As far as intervening goes, I think that the fact that our factories exist there IS the unwelcome intervention that you're talking about. The "foreign intervention" you're talking about IS the American-owned factories, right? Wouldn't forcing our companies to leave these foreign nations be intervening LESS, not more?

I wish that she had been able to speak up earlier in the class. I think that responses from Middle Eastern students were the most vital to the conversation we were trying to have, even more so than our guests from NATO and the SEALs. Even though it was of course a very unique opportunity to hear from those men, I felt that a lot of their responses were guarded or did not really contribute to a conversational atmosphere. For example, Sam asked them how soldiers are socialized and whether empathy can be helpful in that situation. Each of the speakers barely touched on the idea of how soldiers are socialized, and just jumped to the very non-controversial conclusion that empathy is a virtuous trait in a human being.

On the other hand, the Middle Eastern students were extremely straightforward, and offered opinions that were absolutely controversial. Their thoughts were particularly valuable to hear because they are our direct counterparts: university students. Their unrestrained corroboration of Sam’s TED Talk (“Yeah, of course it’s about oil”) added a whole new level to the reception of the talk. Of course, the person whose response was the most telling was the last person’s – the Iranian woman. As soon as she started speaking, her emotions caught the attention of every single person in the room, although not everyone had an agreeable response.

One man in the class responded dismissively: “I’m sure no one dislikes you just because you’re IRANIAN.” I’m equally sure that he is wrong. I was even a little offended that he would presume to know anything about her experience as a Middle Eastern citizen living in the United States. I wish that she had spoken up earlier, because I’m sure that she has had thought-provoking experiences that she could share, and that would be worth talking about in more depth.

I also don’t know if this is reasonable or rational or even okay, but I was pretty viscerally affected by the former Navy SEAL’s response to her. He said something along the lines of: “Every country ultimately ends up with essentially the government that they want to have.” Since she had JUST emphatically said that the US sanctions were hurting her neighbors and family, not just the government that they do not support, I’m sure this comment was like a punch in the gut. While I respect his experiences, knowledge, and opinions, I felt insulted for her. In fact, I feel so personally strongly about this that I honestly wouldn’t be very interested in hearing what he had to say to back up his claim. No matter how you look at it, even though he was making an extremely broad statement, he was, to SOME extent, putting the blame for her government directly on her. In the context of the conversation we were having, the statement reeked of American elitism. For people who have seen the United States government’s interests influence their own quality of life, I feel like his claim is preposterous and entirely unfounded.