I'm not originally from PA, but I spent time in and out the top two major crime cities in the country. Everyone talks bad about the cities. Everyone does. That includes the people living there. I get calls from friends saying how terrible the things are around them. The issue is most definitely not a lack of want. Most people want a better city. It is just a lot harder to change an area like north philly into a respectable place. I found that everything we have talked about in class so far has an answer to it. Sam doesn't directly tell us the answer, but it is always the same. We need to keep talking about these ideas and spreading the knowledge to the people we know. They need to continue to spread it and draw attention to it. One person cannot change a city, but a neighborhood can make the decision to make their block better than the next. Things change when everyone is behind it.

Does that mean you don't agree with the 50-50? At first, I totally agreed with you. I think that I put in a huge amount of work to get where I am now, and I am putting in a huge amount of work, more than anyone I know my age, to get where I want to be. I know people who have an extremely hard time fighting the forces in their community to get where they want to be. I just happen to have a family to support my hard work. Right now, My family is purposely leaving me alone to concentrate to get my work done in order for me to get done before I need to go to bed. I have work tomorrow morning, and so does my friend. He doesn't have the silence I do to complete his work though. I bet I do better in work than he does tomorrow. What if I am chosen for a promotion over him because of my quality of work? When Sam said 50-50, I totally agreed with him. I can't give myself whole credit for what the world does around me.

Sam did a talk at TEDxPSU, where he sort of drops this lecture down to 20 minutes. (http://youtu.be/kUEGHdQO7WA) He doesn't lose much of effect though. I posted it to a few social networks when we killed Osama Bin Laden and added a caption about how I wasn't sure if we had a great victory over terrorism, or we just killed another person we didn't understand. I had plenty of responses about how they couldn't believe that I would say something like that, and even one that didn't see how the video had anything to do with what had happened. It was scary to see how many people could not empathize. Once again, I wish Sam gave us some answers to the problems people face. I just don't understand how he could give such a great talk and then have people not understand and not agree. When it comes to bullying in school, it just boils down to people not understanding. People have the hardest time with empathy, and it is a huge problem in america with so many different people from all walks of life.

I am pissed. Maybe, I didn’t get enough sleep today. Maybe, I had a long day at work. Maybe, I just have had enough. I usually am a very calm person, but these lectures just set me up to get angry at people today. The scene that put me passed keeping it internal was the video of soldiers running over a taxi driver’s car with their tank, because he stole wood. I was furious. Things like this give the USA as a country a bad name. It gives people in other countries reason to hate us when they see us. That scene is all I would have had to see before I joined the resistance and gave my life putting an end to injustice. I fully understand reasoning behind anyone who hates Americans with a passion. It is terrible that no American can feel safe travelling to countries that have seen this side of the USA. Sam always asks if it makes you “feel some kind of way,” and I can tell you that a video like that can make just about anybody feel some kind of way. For most it is going to be angry. I started off the lecture reminding myself that I would never kill someone. There is always another option. Ending life is not something that can be justified. By the end of the lectures, I found plenty of reason to kill. Putting myself in their shoes, I felt like there were no options. It would be like yelling and screaming for your life and the life of your family, but people look at you, hear you, and then ignore you. What can you do? What choice do you have? You have the power to kill. You have the power to defend what you hold dear. You have the power to fight for your place in the world, but what other option do you have? This one is going to make me think long and hard about what I could do in their situation. I can’t see any option that would help the situation, but I hope there is one. There has to be another option. To admit that one has no power over the world around them is very depressing and unfortunate. That leads me to think about how easy it would be to suicide bomb. I don’t know enough about this to comment, but I will comment anyway. Maybe someone else can correct me. I would think that suicide bombing would be very easy if you thought you had no way of living a life where you could make a difference. Ending your suffering along with ending the lives of those who caused your agony starts to sound like a logical solution. That would be a selfless act to benefit the people who come after you. Maybe you could make a change for the better in the world that they live in.

This professor’s lectures get me so excited for what he has to say. He is one of those guys that is so excited about the knowledge he has that he wants to share it, but he can’t speak fast enough to keep up with his thoughts, so he stutters and switches back and forth on subjects. I wish I could take a class with him as an independent study. Remove the slides, and I bet he would go on and on about the most interesting topics of racial sociology. Jumping between ideas just shows how much everything is connected. Every time a subject comes up, he pauses as he realizes he can teach us something else before he continues with what he was saying. I can’t even keep track of his thought process. Somehow, he follows his slides though. For some reason, these lectures get me hooked, and when he stutters searching for the words, I am just itching in anticipation. I really can’t believe how interesting he makes these lessons. In part one of lecture, he stops mid conversation to look for another microphone and I was yelling in my head for him to finish his thought.

I really wish they wouldn’t censor his lectures though. This is college. I think everyone should expect to have mature conversations at a college level. Besides that, he defends his speaking in a perfectly acceptable way. One, he is teaching a course where people need to be honest with themselves about who they are. He wouldn’t be a very good leader if he put up a different front. Two, he clearly just proved that the language only has meaning when it is given meaning. Society has selected random words for censoring. I have never heard a better argument for freedom of words. I love that Penn State has people like this to teach classes. For a general education course, I really feel like I am learning some life lessons for this guy, and we are two weeks into the course.

Last note I want to make is about black people and white people. Did you know you can be a black Asian? How about a white person with coarse curly hair? I just figured those out. So, black people have black skin. They don’t have to be from a certain area. The same goes for white people. Light skin doesn’t mean you won’t have the coarse hair most people relate to black people. Skin has no control over your other features. This makes a lot of sense once I thought about it, but I just never thought that skin color was completely separate from all of the other characteristics a person has. I knew all of the other features could change in an infinite number of ways, but I always thought that skin was tied down for some reason. Thank you for opening my eyes, Sam.

It is really unbelievable how much we try to categorize people throughout history. We have never been successful, but we still try to. The facts are plain and simple, but people still try. We walk done the streets, see a person’s looks, and subconsciously try to label them in a category. Real world experiments like the one in lecture part 1 shows how we really are just throwing people together how WE think they should be grouped. There is so much that defines a person’s race that we don’t notice. When Ethnicity enters the conversation, one can only imagine where to categorize people.

Hi

I had mixed feelings when I got a thirty something percent on the quiz. I obviously was like you. We don’t know as much as we thought we did. It kind of makes you feel bad right? But then at the same time, everyone else did poorly. That should make us feel ok that we aren’t below the norm. This got me thinking about how that really shouldn’t make us feel good at all. That just shows how our country and our world do not understand each other. Hopefully Sam brings some good news to us soon, because I get a little depressed thinking about how badly we are at understanding the people around us. Imagine what would happen to our world if everyone got 100% on that quiz! That is a powerful thought for me, but how do we reach that?