The Albanian Stereotype?!

"My father was the perfect hippie, since all the hippies were trying to be Indian." (Alexie) 

Regardless of your race and ethnicity, everyone has a stereotype attached to them. For African Americans its that they are thugs and like eating fried chicken. For Asians, its that they are good at math and piano. For Indians, its that they only eat curry and are also good at math. Even white people have these stereotypes. Their stereotype is that they only drive pickup trucks and chew tobacco. I could go on and on, but that's not the point. We all know stereotypes exist and we all know that for the most part, they are not true. In class we examined how much influence stereotypes have on peoples perspectives on that particular race, sex, or ethnicity. Sherman Alexie grappled with stereotypes in the Jimi Hendrix piece as well as his film: Smoke Signals. In both of these he examines how peoples views on Native Americans are shaped by stereotypes and that in turn Native Americans are expected to act like those stereotypes suggest. 

On this blog post I really wanted to talk about my own personal experience with stereotypes, these stereotypes may be ones that you may not have heard of before. As an Albanian, I'm very proud of my culture and where I come from but just like every other ethnicity, there are stereotypes attached to me. When people find out what I am, the most usual response I get is "Ohhh, really?! I could tell by your bushy eyebrows! I love Albanians.! Does your dad own a coney island?" For the most part I'm not really offended by this and most Albanians that I know arent either but it does annoy me and many other Albanian Americans. I really don't understand where people got the stereotype of all Albanians owning coney islands. Out of all the Albanians I know, only two of them own one. This stereotype doesn't offend me because it doesn't cause people to have prejudice and look down upon me because of it. Some stereotypes that are aimed towards blacks are pretty crude and I completely understand why blacks can be offended by them. All in all, my experiences with stereotypes are tame compared to other ethnicity stereotypes . I learned a lesson this week though, although the stereotypes don't affect or offend some, doesn't mean its okay to spew this "knowledge" and make jokes about ethnicities because chances are, they don't fit into that stereotype and it will give the uninformed a skewed viewpoint. 

Truth!

"Truth". The word itself may seem easy to define, but in all actuality it may be the hardest word to define. Everyone can claim what they believe to be true but there will always be another person who will ask: "How do you know its true?" Truth always seems to be in question in all of our lives and in our society today, whether its the medias distortion of the truth or your friend telling you a little white lie, we never are really sure what to believe. Perhaps there's no such thing as an absolute truth but rather only perspectives and beliefs. "But David wait! What do you mean there is no such thing as an absolute truth? We know we are here don't we? We all die right? That's the truth!": an angry reader may say to me. But in all honesty how do we know this? How do we know we really are her, how do we know what will happen to us? The answer to that is that we don't. To me and all my years of living I've come to the realization that an absolute truth doesn't exist. Everyone has a different perspective and we make our own truths. We define what we believe is true and what we believe is fake. Some of us hate conspiracy theories and dismiss them as "fake" while some us bask in conspiracy theories and believe it to be true.I don't mean to come off controversial or anything but come on, think about it. How do we actually know something is true? I never really put this much thought into what the truth is, but after our discussions on TTTC everyone brought up really good points that made me think a lot. Some would say we know there are truths while others would say some peoples truths are not true for others. I also saw the validity of truth being questioned in the actual book. O'Brien constantly switches up the truth and we don't know what to believe. "For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters."(O'Brien, How to tell a true war story) He constantly blurs the line between truth and fiction in the story which leaves the reader unsatisfied with he's telling them. He frustrated me when he said one thing was not true after he spent a  whole chapter telling us it was true. Maybe hat was the effect he was going for. Maybe he wanted us to be frustrated with finding  the truth in the book just like we are with finding the truth in real life.