I thought this site was really great and relevant to some of our discussions in class. This is one interesting presentation around race that I thought you might relate to. It comes from a post entitled, 'The Questions People Get Asked About Their Race'. I also really appreciated another post on the stereotype of black people loving fried chicken. The post references the film The Birth of a Nation which is available for streaming on Netflix. When we talk about the history of race and stereotypes, media has, and still is one place with a powerful influence.
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We began the class by watching a TED talk by Bryan Stevenson who asks the TED audience to think about some of the more difficult inequalities that exist in the world and to begin to talk more openly about them. This video propelled our discussion on diversity through the lens of integration. Questions arose about what integration looks like, how it differs from diversity, and how challenging we feel true integration is to achieve. We connected feelings of marginalization and exclusion to issues around race, thought about whether our classroom is an integrated space, and how, while we say integration is something we want, we find ourselves wondering how true this is for the entire country. We acknowledge the role history plays in framing our current views on race as well as our families, friends, and communities.
We bagan to think about race, segregation, and community today with our first group presenting on diversity. This group focused on how the segregation they experience in their neighborhoods impacts their sense of community identity. Feelings of cultural isolation, discomfort, and safety arose as we all worked through ideas about racial stereotypes and racial identity. Some personal experiences that were shared connect to larger social theory, specifically in group/out group dynamics, habitus, code-switching, and double bind. Today we were engaged in a fascinating conversation about safety, people, and places, especially thinking about how we associate safety with certain groups of people based on class, race, and neighborhood stereotypes. We also talked about nature and how we sometimes want our nature manicured versus "natural". Again, I would like us to define terms, what do we mean by natural and unnatural? Are humans part of nature? Are the things humans build part of nature, the same way a beaver dam might be considered part of nature? Why do we care about access to nature and do we all have equal access to it? Our group asked us to respond to the question of how we imagine our ideal communities? What kinds of images come to mind for you when you think about ideal communities? Who are the people, behaviors, and places that make up our imagined u Here is a recent New York Times article on affordable housing in New York City. This is a term that has been used in class and should be problematized. As a child we are often raised to be able to assimilate to a certain culture, whether it is that of your own or of the one that is dominant in the area you are being raised. But then there are certain cases where a child is merely left to be exposed to what is occurring around them: this is my case. As a child I wasn’t raised speaking Spanish as a first language, or any language at that, although all of the adults in my family speak fluent English and Spanish. I asked my mother why she didn’t raise me to speak the language of my culture and she replies, “I don’t know, I made a mistake. It was just instinct to speak English first.” And then I wondered exactly why it would be instinct for a woman who was raised speaking Spanish first by a mother who only speaks Spanish, to speak English and only English to her child. It’s because we live in the United States. Here there is not a mix of cultures from all over the world but rather a new “culture” that requires assimilation to what society thinks is proper and “American”. In the video Maya Del Valle says that at the end of the day the color of her skin still marks her as an alien in the country of her birth: America. How is it that someone with culture can’t be accepted into a country that claims to be the land of the free and the home of the brave? And then I question myself. Why is it that I’ve allowed this? I know that at one point in my life I’d resented being Puerto Rican because I personally could never connect to either culture. I’m Puerto Rican but I can’t speak Spanish the way my people do, I’m American and I can try to assimilate as much as possible, but to this American society I am a Puerto Rican and no matter what I do to look or act like a white person I will never have their privileges. So where do I go from here? In High School I met a lot of individuals who embraced their cultures righteously and I came to terms with the fact that I am Puerto Rican. Why not embrace my culture? My people have gone through so much and still do in the country that I call my home and I had the audacity to try and act like the individuals who were in reality causing oppression to my people, and me. I may not speak the physical language of my people but I feel the burden that’s been placed on them, we share emotional language. I know that as a Puerto Rican I will have to fight for the rights of my people and not just the rights written on paper and passed as laws, but the respect and the dignity. I will embrace my own people that as Maya Del Valle says do not deny the darker shades of skin in me. And not because I am capable of wonderful things and just so happen to be Puerto Rican, but because I am Puerto Rican therefore I am capable of wonderful things. - Lourdes
An interesting story about soccer and city parks. I know many of you LOVE soccer, as do I, but at what cost to a city park. Check out this story about a potential new soccer stadium being built in Flushing Meadows Park and see how you connect this to our class. Access and quality of food, transportation, green space, and housing was the topic of today's nested discussion. Our discussion facilitators focused on how each experiences varying access and quality to these services in Spanish Harlem, Lower East Side, Woodside, Elmhurst, and the Upper West Side/Morningside. A question about whether we want a Chipotle in our neighborhoods generated an interesting conversation again about the tensions of wanting access to certain types of food and what a place like Chipotle represents when it moves into a community. The group asked us to reflect on a few questions. Do you see a relationship between community access/quality to food, transportation, green space, and housing to vary based on socioeconomic status? When you think about yourself, how has your community access/quality marked you and impacted you? Do you feel that when new things are added to your community that represent something other, is it disrespecting your identity? Thanks to our facilitators and class for another great day of conversation. Today's nested discussion (a new term we are using to define a hybrid of a digital presentation, a critical small group discussion, and a simultaneous larger group discussion), was truly engaging around how we identify our communities and identify with our communities. Some things we would love to hear you talk more about are how you define diversity and what is important to you about diversity? Who is responsible for a community? How do we resolve the tension between development and change and the good and the bad that come along with that? What is going on in the city that are influencing what you are seeing in your communities? One thing Christine and I spoke about was how you are thinking about making/creating communities as you are about to leave high school and go off to college? Any other thoughts that came up from the class are of course welcome. |
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