Month: November 2019

On Tuesday I attended the Sharp Speaker Series presentation “The Race Card.” The speaker, Michele Norris, is a journalist who worked for NPR and became its first black female host. In 2002, she wrote a memoir called The Grace of Silence about her experience with racism. The main focus of her talk was her project that she started in 2010 called “The Race Card.” In this project, she strives to create a platform for people around the world to talk about race by having anyone submit a response online about what race means to them in six words or less.

During her presentation, Norris gave an example of the work she does on a daily basis by reading through some of the responses that she receives, which to me was the most interesting aspect of the project because of the diversity of responses. One of the comments that stood out to me was “Father was racist. I’m not. Progress!”. I found this comment interesting because to me it felt like this person does not understand that  just because they as an individual are not racist does not mean that race is not a significant issue because many people are still openly racist. However, it is difficult to judge this person’s views based on a six word online comment because we do not know why they think that way.

Norris also talked about the fact that many of the responses she receives are from white people, and that the variety of responses can lead to a more productive discussion, which is one of the goals of her project. For example, people of color who have grown up with racism as a part of their daily life may be surprised to read comments from white people about how race is not an issue anymore because they have such different experiences.

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This video certainly opened my eyes to what happened domestically during the Vietnam War. I knew the protests were a big deal but I did not quite understand the magnitude of them until now. It was interesting to see who the leaders were during these protests. I know he didn’t see it through to the end, but the video showed a clip of MLK talking about the war in Vietnam, something I did not know he was fighting against. As a college student now, it puts a lot of these things into perspective. The firing upon students from the national guard at Kent State particularly bothered me. The situation had so many parallels to the Boston Massacre once I thought about it;  protesters throwing things at the people with guns and no order to fire. History certainly does repeat itself. I think the clip of soldiers throwing their medals said everything that one would need to know about how most Americans felt about the war by the time it was over.

I think there’s a lot of comparisons that can be drawn between how divided the country was then and how divided we are now. LBJ referred to the silent majority of Americans who he believed would be in support of the war in Vietnam. Trump focused heavily on the silent majority of Americans who are thought to have won him the election in 2016. The country was so polarized, similar to how it is now. One of the things that confused me the most was why it took so long after Nixon’s election for the war to end, considering he campaigned on ending the war. This just goes to show that campaign promises not being kept are nothing new. I think the protests demonstrate the power of dissent, and I think it’s great that dissent has power in this country and can get results with enough persistence. Though if I have to be completely honest, I think attempting to raid the Pentagon was just stupid.

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Last evening I went to hear Michelle Norris talk about her project-The Race Card Project. This began as a simple exercise of just defining race in six words. Now it serves as a platform for people around the world to talk about race. During the talk she showed us daily work that she does as she goes through the archives of responses. One thing I noticed was that every card made me feel a different way. The fact that she lets people’s cards to be seen by others is an important aspect to her project.

Her process of beginning a social experiment/exercise was a cool aspect to me. It was a first hand example of a social experiment and how to apply it. She grouped the different responses into categories. Although this is a sensitive topic to discuss she included racist cards as well. I think the inclusion of these cards is almost a reverse way of getting her point across. She talked about although we think one way, it is important to understand that people think differently than us, but understanding the reason they think that way is where people should look.

 

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The Vietnam War is one that truly divided the nation and tested the bounds of our society. In watching this video something interesting that struck me was the usage of physical, violent efforts versus non-violence. It was reported that a lot of the violent efforts were carried out by college students. Specifically thinking about the March into the Pentagon that took place in Washington, this was a very bold, violent move that resulted in many arrests and prompted some of the violence that took place after this event. Although this march was very powerful, thinking about the non-violent aspects of the riots–they were also very powerful. In the video, we hear that there were multiple reports of people chanting “Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today”. This chant, even for the president, was very powerful as he said it made it difficult to sleep at night knowing that his people thought this of him–he was mindlessly killing young kids. In this case both methods were effective in their own respects but, it was especially interesting to me to witness the power of verbal protests in this movement.

Another interesting part of this video was the mention of fighting the Vietnam War abroad when the government had yet to fight the War on Poverty within the states. This is a topic that I think is still relevant today because the United States government, in my opinion, takes too much value in trying to fix other nations and their governments (ex: Venezuela) when there are countless problems within the states that should take precedence. I believe when running a nation that it is one’s duty to assure that everything within their own nation is being addressed before putting themselves, or in this case, sending unwilling troops, to fight another battle overseas.

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On November 12th I went to watch Michele Norris’s discussion on the Race Card Project. In this talk, Norris mainly spoke about different 6-word submissions that her team received for the question about what race means to you. One of the responses that intrigued me said, “Father was racist, I’m not. Progress!”. This response stood out to me because it was a comment I didn’t expect to see written out on paper. This was one of Michele’s main goals in showing the card replies–to reveal these unanticipated responses.

Although people tend to have implicit biases and opinions that may be against the norm, it is difficult to say these thoughts and opinions out loud as the responses and replies can be very harsh from those who disagree. Through anonymous cards, people feel more comfortable putting their thoughts out to the public. The comment on this card, in particular, made me aware of how those who are not people of color feel about race. It is difficult, sometimes, to understand opposing viewpoints but this card was very clear and explicit about their personal relationship with progressing to a more equal society. Instead of simply saying that they were not racist, they acknowledged the past of racism being the norm as well as confirming that they would be the person in their generation to change those beliefs. Although I’m sure there is an entire story behind these words, which we cannot see, the choice of words was very powerful to me.

In addition to admitting these implicit biases, it also struck me that many of the comments on the cards were clearly from people who were not people of color. It is often expected that people of color are the first and most vocal about race and racial problems because it affects them the most. However, Norris talked about the fact that white people, in particular, have their own truth and the cards were a way to reveal that truth. Whether that truth was that they felt guilty for slavery, felt disadvantaged because of “post-racism”, or some combination of the two–this was their truth. I think this was a very important statement. When surrounded by others who look like yourself it is easy to have an echo chamber and never encounter new, differing opinions but Norris encouraged this as a way to expand your perspective and learn more about why your opinion is what it is. It is important to allow each person, despite race, to say their own truth even if we may not agree with it ourselves. She emphasized that although cards were a good way to hear this truth the message should resonate in day-to-day conversations.

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It is now apparent to me that young teens and college students have a lot of power in the realm of protest and political movements. Time and time again they have stood up for what they believed and became the front lines of protest. Back in high school, I along with my friend lead many walkouts in my school, but I thought that because Chicago was so progressive, it was the only place such acts would be seen. But now learning more about the specifics behind political movements such as war, racial justice, and women’s right to vote, it is clear that we college students have the power to lead. 

This video was very eye-opening to me because it shows how the US has dealt with civil disobedience throughout history. It’s not surprising why we still see police take advantage of their power and turn around and defend it with “they felt like their lives were in danger.” Something else that captured my attention was how the Vietnam veterans felt about the war coming back home. Today I see veterans proud to have served this country, but the fact that these veterans went as far as to throw their metals back shows how unwilling they were in going to war in the first place. 

This poses my question which is, what is our current Vietnam war? What is something our country is so politically or socially separated on that we are willing to protest to see change?

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I never learned much about the Vietnam war or its protests before this video. I thought the video was interesting and it taught me a lot of things. I knew that, like everything else, race played a role in it but I wasn’t sure how. I did not know that black people had a higher chance of being killed during the war compared to white people. I also completely understood their reasoning for not wanting to be drafted. Why would you fight for a country that sees you as inferior to others? It made me think of Muhammed Ali who openly spoke against the draft as well. the draft is unfair and appeals to the rich so I understand why people protested. I wish I would’ve learned more about it in school and I wonder why I didn’t.

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The Vietnam War, in its entirety, was indescribably terrible. It is just unthinkable to me that the US can have blatant and constant disrespect for minorities and people who are poor, all in all the “others” in the eyes of the government. Anyone who is not them. And this is amplified along with the amount of money that it will cost or give them. I feel like, throughout my school career, I rarely heard much about the Vietnam War, especially in respect with the governments hand in things. Other than learning about PTSD and things that have happened to US soldiers as a result of it. But never about the protest nor about all the things that happened there. Everything I did learn came from outside sources.

My grandfather actually served in Vietnam, and if he were alive today I wish I could understand more about his experience with that. How he got involved and what he experienced there. I also wonder, with all the things in the past that the government has done, what are they still doing today that is not being spoken about. Most of the things, that I am sure do exist, probably can’t be seen or understand by us because we are all privileged in a sense since we all are in at a university. How do we change that?

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On Tuesday November 12 I listened to Michele Norris’ talk about The Race Card Project. The Race Card Project is something that she founded, that people define race or discuss their ideas about race in only six words.

It is so interesting how hesitant people are to talk about race. Sometimes we are scared of saying something that no one else may relate to, or it may hurt someones’ feelings. However, it is important to realize that everyones’ ideas are valid and speak numbers about our culture. It is even more interesting to see how people who identify differently than me see/understand race. When we tried this project one girl wrote “it really isn’t a big deal.” Which confused me, because growing up in the south, it was really all I thought about it. But to others its’ effects are invisible. Beginning and opening up this conversation about race is so important because it actively affects our lives, even if it is not noticeable or visible to some. People constantly make decisions based on race, so we all need to continue to educate ourselves on its’ true effects on everyone.

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I feel like I have never learned much about the Vietnam war or the protests taking place in the U.S. during that time. I had heard of some of the events mentioned in that video, such as the Kent state protests, but I never really realized how these events were connected. I had also learned that this was a war the people heavily protested and knew that some people refused to be drafted. My elementary school principal was sent to prison for refusing to be drafted, which is something I have always though about. It seems incredibly unfair that there were so many loopholes to get out of the draft. Based on what was mentioned in the video, it seems that those were most accessible for more affluent populations, such as people that could afford to go to college.

I had never thought much about the impacts that the Vietnam war would have on specific population. Previous classes have never taught me about the disproportionate number of African Americans dying the war. I found it interesting to hear comments from people representing black Americans about why they would refuse to serve, but it makes complete sense. Why would you go to war when you have an especially high change of dying? It’s even less fair than it already was. I also found MLK’s comments about the amount of money spent on the war compelling. He said that it was estimated that $322,000 dollars was spent for each person killed in Vietnam, whereas in the war on poverty, only $53 was spent on each person classified as poor. This information would make me question the priorities of my government.

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In this video, we learned about the Vietnam protest movement and the increasing American opinion to bring the troops home from the war. People drafted in the military were disprortionately black, without a college degree, and from lower socio economic classes. The drafting committees were decentralized and it was largely up to the powerful, almost autonomous committees when deciding who would be drafted into war. Many Americans felt as if this wasn’t their war to fight, Vietnam was on the other side of the world and this war was being fought amidst a number of issues on the homefront. Race played a big role in this conflict, as blacks protested during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s not just for equality, but also protested because they refused to be sent to Vietnam. A large number of veterans who returned home even openly protested against the war and famously ripped off their medals on camera. This movement met a severe backlash, and many accused members of the anti war movememnt as being unpatriotic.

This association of anti war movements with anti patriotism is nothing new in American politics. The legacy of the Vietnam syndrome and the anti patriotism associated with this era was a big talking point for Republicans in the 2004 election Bush vs. Kerry. Many Republicans accused Kerry of being unpatriotic due to his open opposition to war in the 60s, and his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. The scene of Kerry throwing his medal in the video had a huge impact on his political career, and the Democrat party as a whole. Even just a few years ago, when Kerry finalized the Iran Nuclear Deal, many Americans saw him as an unpatriotic man who was not loyal to his own country and did not risk himself for the flag. It evokes the quintessential role of the American citizens that arose in debates between the Federalists and the Democrat Republicans in the 1790s- what is the role of the American? Should they unquestioningly trust their government and praise their freedom? Or should they question their government, be critical, and offer suggestions, even if militant and radical at times? Or is it a little bit of both??

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Anthropologist, Dr Hirsch talked on the International Criminal Court. She talked about how the ICC is a global type of security. This was interesting to see leadership at a global level. Those who sign the preamble are responsible to the ICC to help prevent things like genocide. The overall purpose of the ICC is to be a safety net and alliance for countries incase a (member) country cannot handle a global threat. Hirsch talked a good bit about the resistance to the ICC, particularly the United States. The main reason for resistance is military concern. An important system of leadership within the US.

This resistance from the United States has been seen recently as well. The US is beginning to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. In recent history, the US has been a leader globally. As Hirsch talked I began to wonder if the US can maintain that dominance if they are critics or unwilling to agree globally. The US obviously is not in the ICC along with countries like China, Libya, Iraq, and Qatar.

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In his talk, Sean Theriault was presenting a current work in progress, which was interesting because there were still some unanswered questions and date yet to be filled in. Even so, I feel like I learned a lot about why we have so much political gridlock. This talk was about the decline of bipartisanship in Congress. He started off by telling us about how unique the senate is because it takes 60 votes to get anything done. This means that Congressmen must consult with people outside of their party in order to get anything passed. Thus, bipartisanship is required in Congress. I think this decline in bipartisanship is related to the lowering public opinion of the Senate. Only 25% of people believe that the senate is going a good job. Surveying has shown that the language used to describe Congress is almost never positive never positive. Furthermore, people said they prefer head lice, traffic jams, the country of France, and root canals to Congress. 

Party polarization has grown overtime and become a problem for our Senate. In the 1950s senators were senators before they were members of a political party. Now senators are so concerned with the wants of their political party that fewer laws are enacted because compromises cannot be made. Too much partisanship and narrow thinking does not lead to practical problem solving. Few senators are able to exercise free will because there is a lot of pressure from their party and constituents to act one way.  Theriault pointed out a couple really interesting ways we can see that people in Senate are getting along less with members of the opposite party than they used to. There is less and less participation in events like seersucker Thursday and secret santa. Previously, these used to be activities that members of both parties would participate in. 

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These stories are what I think of when I think of humanities. At first I struggled with how to connect the readings to leadership (I know leadership can really be applied to anything) but after a little more reflection, I understood.

The Omelas story reminds me very much of Plato’s Allegory of the cave. Children and adults who never see the child in the cell are like the people in stage one of the cave looking at the shadows but not realizing the shadows are not real. Once people see the child in the cell they are on their way out of the cave. The author describes how when people see the child they either become incredibly sad and then move on or become so incredibly sad they walk away and only they know where they are walking. I think this has a lot to do with leadership especially leadership of social movements. Injustices in society are brought to people’s attention because they involve injustices. We label people who see or suffer from these injustices and then act to combat them as leaders and we label people who see them and walk away from them as cowards or ignorant.

 

As for the lottery, I definitely picked up more of a women in leadership conversation starter. The fact that men ran the show and were the only ones capable of picking a number and determining their fate is not news but it still contributes to the narrative of a patriarchal society. The fact that the person chosen as the lottery winner (yet more like loser) was a woman only strengthens the story’s patriarchal themes. The rules that say a woman cannot pick a number and daughters must draw with their husbands family seem outlandish yet REAL laws and REAL policies we have as a REAL society say very similar things (ie, signing on a credit card to prove income or marital rape exemptions). We have learned a lot about marginalized groups throughout the semester and The Lottery is just another example of how women are part of the marginalized.

Overall, these short stories don’t seem like much on the surface but after a few more close-reads, they tell a lot about women, society, laws, mindsets, and of course leadership in the humanities.

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The author described Omelas as this perfect utopian society, where there is no need for drugs, war, and everyone is equal.  One of the main points of the story is how everyone in society is equal, but the child in the cellar contradicts this idea. The story describes how the child,  “…is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes–the child has no understanding of time or interval–sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there” (Guin, 5-6).  I interpreted that this child in the above section was either autistic or had some sort of mental illness. In Omelas, it seems that a person can not be ‘defective’ in anyway otherwise they are not allowed to be apart of the utopian society. The people of Omelas claim that if they let the child into the real-world, then the happiness of the city would be at risk. What this society does not realize is that despite preaching for equality, they are preventing everyone from being able to join in on their utopia, which in itself is unequal. It is one thing to essentially institutionalize the child, but the people of Omela go out of their way to mistreat the kid. In a society that is supposed to be full of happiness, mistreating people, even if they are not recognized by the society as a whole, demonstrates how the culture is inherently flawed.

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I was very surprised by this story The lottery, it starts off innocently enough with the children gathering rocks and coming to a lottery after school is done. The entire story is about the lottery system and how it wasn’t fair for Tessie. It is revealed that Tessie has drawn the bad card, there is a twist in that it ends up being Tessie is to be stoned by her family and friends as they surround her.

The ones who walk away from the Omelas is an interesting story as well because it describes the city as a perfect society and utopia, however, this concept and idea is constantly questioned in terms of legitimacy. The people are happy and it talks about their celebrations and traditions.

Both of these stories show how people in societies react to tradition and when constructs are built-in society how people are quick to conform and just do. People act blindly when they feel like everything will work out and attribute their behaviors to success without thinking deeply.

 

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On Friday I went to watch the film Rafiki. Rafiki is a Kenyan film that features the daughters of two political rivals, Kena and Ziki who fall in love in a society rampant with homophobia and discrimination. Seeing as homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, the two continuously struggle with hos much affection to show each other. Kena begins flirting with Ziki and soon the pair are going on dates. Ziki’s friends get jealous which leads them to attack Kena and when Ziki helps her with her injuries, Kena’s mom catches them kissing. This is where their romance takes a dark turn. They are both arrested and Ziki is sent to London. A couple years pass and Kena has become a doctor, which was her dream. Kena hears that Ziki is back and they meet and their love has not faded. Before the movie, we were given s brief background of the political weight of this movie. What I thought was really fascinating about this movie is that it was actually banned in Kenya. It was put up for a festival and the director sued the government to let the film be shown. It was unbanned for 7 days and showed to sold-out audiences each showing. It was really interesting for me to see how another society responds to homosexuality. Here in the US there is definitely still a lot of homophobia but nothing like in Kenya. It is a totally different culture around homosexuality and it took it as a learning experience.

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The lottery passage was very intriguing as I compared it to society in the United States. A lottery is something that is used to strip any social prestige. I think it is an effective way of randomly selecting people. As the people in that community understood their tradition of the lottery I think you can compare that to the draft in the United States. As US citizens we understand the obligation we serve to our country if we are selected. It is a very democratic practice if done fairly.

The Omelas are unique people and quite honestly I think it would be very interesting to live in their society. The Omelas are people who are obviously a tight nit group of people. Through their own culture and rules they have achieved happiness. In this society it is clear that everyone has their own duties to the community to make it function. This was a common theme I found in both passages. They both analyzed how the followers of a community do their part.

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One of the parts of the story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” that really made me think and look back throughout the reading is the last several sentences when Le Guin describes the people who leave the town after seeing the child. Le Guin puts it like “They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.” This is so intriguing to me and made me try to decipher what this truly meant and/or parallels from the real world that I could find.My guess is that the ones who walk away are like those in any society that recognize an injustice or flaw and strive to fix it… or at least they cannot continue being a happy part of the happy town knowing there happiness is at the cost of another. When Le Guin says “But they seem to know where they are going,” I interpreted this as, while the literal solution is unclear, those who walk away knowing that the direction that they want to be going is away from the ideologies of the happy town. They know that they are headed in the best direction, even if they do not know where the destination is quite yet.

 

 This story is clearly about followership and fear in the face of the unknown. The followers who choose to stay in the town, happy, even though they know a child is suffering reminds me of the phenomena that happen in real life. Millions, trillions of people go on with their lives knowing of the troubles, inequalities, and horrors of the world are occurring and will continue occurring because these thoughts are swept under the rug or saved for later by so many.

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The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a short story I had heard of in comparison to the Lottery, but never got a chance to read. Because of this, the twist was spoiled for me, but it really didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the story at all. I really loved the casual unreliability of the narrator. I also liked that the narrator just came out and said imagine Omelas one way or another way, it doesn’t matter. Scene setting isn’t the purpose of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. What is important is the situation of Omelas. In that respect, the story also (probably intentionally) contradicts itself by criticizing those who only notice suffering and then only going into extreme detail on the suffering of the child in the base (that was hard to read and imagine). Everything else about Omelas is up for open interpretation except for this poor child’s situation.

Another very interesting aspect of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is what the speaker says people have to think about the child in order for them to be okay with it. “They begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a very little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy” (page 6). This explanation is dehumanizing to the poor child, the people of Omelas cease to view “it” (and the speaker refers to the child as “it”) as a human being! Don’t you just love groupthink? I was so mad when I read that.

The townspeople of the Lottery‘s justification for their violent ritual is even more flimsy than Omelas’. They are just creatures of habit, completely unable to change their ritual because it’s been done for so long because they are afraid of what will happen without it. Really it seems like they hardly think of stopping it. This is why, in my opinion,  The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is better at explaining this phenomenon of people forgetting their humanity, because it talks about (and is named after) those who can’t. The Lottery hints at this by mentioning other towns, but (and maybe it’s because I’ve read this story too many times in high school) the point doesn’t strike as well as it does in Omelas. What do y’all think?

 

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