Puzzle Paragraph 2

While others say beauty is in the eyes of the beholder; others disagree with that sentiment and strive for what they believe is society's standards for beauty. Disliking yourself because of the way you look is worse than being disliked by others for the way you look. It's worse because you are accepting this and internalizing it. You are the one believing that you are ugly and you start to loathe yourself. Loathing yourself is arguably worse than gambling all of your money in a casino in the author's opinion. Loathing yourself and being lonely can make you feel like the Lone Ranger. Toni Morrison describes Pecola in the foreword as an important character who was meant to have people look into themselves however she tries to show Pecolas suffering without making the other characters villainous. In this passage Morrison examines her friend wanting blue eyes even though she is black, she tries not to make it seem like she's profiling but she does not think her friend needs blue eyes because it's not right.  She believes she needs to embrace her race and all the beauties of being black. This book is not a memoir but it feels like an expression of feelings and thoughts of the author. There may be truth in this book and there may not be truth, but the author will create verisimilitude about life through writing about the main characters battle with herself and with society. This book will have passion and hopefully, it will evoke a fire from the readers.               

The Idiotic Theory of Scientific Racism

Scientific racism is "the use of  scientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, racialism, or racial superiority" Thankfully this theory has been denounced by the scientific community since the 1950's, however at one point in history, this was widely believed and used to enslave, kill, and mistreat other races. One particular example of this theory being used for evil is the holocaust and nazi movement. The Nazi's used this theory to justify their awful treatment of jews in concentration camps as well as the whole holocaust in general. They believed that the aryan race was the only race fit enough to be worthy of life. They also classified many other types of people into the "unfit category", which led to the extermination jews, homosexuals, and mentally disabled. 

The one thing that MAUS does exceptionally well is portraying what the nazis did in such an accurately historical manner. On page 58 of volume 2 they show this theory of "unfit" being applied. They selected who was fit enough to live and who was unfit to die. 

The thing about scientific racism that scared me the most was that it was used in the united states as well. I was doing research and I stumbled across what scientific racists believed in regards to blacks. Scientific racists "described black men as uniquely fitted for bondage, because of their "primitive psychological organization".In 1851, in antebellum Louisiana, the physician Samuel A. Cartwright (1793–1863), considered slave escape attempts as "drapetomania", a treatable mental illness, that 'with proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented'."(Samuel Sillen "racism and psychiatry, 1972)

This theory is probably the worst theory ever created, it's even worse that it was applied as vehemently as it was in the U.S and nazi germany. This has caused so many unnecessary deaths in our world. At the end of the day, there is only ONE race; the human race. 

MAUS

I'm not gonna lie. When Ms. Valentio handed me MAUS and told me to read the first chapter I looked at the cover and I was really confused. Why is there a swastika? Why does hitler look like a cat? And why is there mice hugging each other? Before even opening the book I decided to analyze the cover and i realized what it was trying to portray. It was trying to say that during the holocaust, jews were mice to the german, who were cats. It made total sense to me and I was excited to read it, but then I actually opened the book and it was in comic form. The whole thing. I've never actually read a comic before so I was excited to do so. This whole book has been very enjoyable and very effective for me and  actually think that this form may be more effective than a book in portraying the pain and emotions in history. The page that I want to show will exemplify this.

Page 108/109


This panel is so incredible to me because it is able to show so many things that just words alone could not do. We see that vladek is looking incredibly skinny which is because of not being fed at the concentration camp. This is subtle but can only be shown through pictures. I think that an author just describing to us that vladek was skinny wouldn't do the actuality of it much justice, but since there is a picture to show us it does. His emotion are portrayed in this panel as well. We see the anger and the sadness, and the nervousness by just looking into his eyes. Without the words the reader could still interpret what he is feeling just by the drawing alone.

I'm not necessarily saying that comics are better than books, but i do feel that comics are very important and can show the reader many things that just words on a paper could not.
Thanks for reading! What are your thoughts?

Misconceptions

When I first read the calender and saw that we were reading feminist literature, I groaned and rolled my eyes expecting to read the typical man bashing, bra burning  type of work but boy was I wrong. The first mistake I made this week was expecting to read that type of work, but the real underlying issue is that I assumed all feminists were radical, when in reality only a small minority of women are in this category of "bra burning". Feminism is so much more than what I thought it was at first. Thanks to the Hooks piece, the Kingston piece, discussions with Mrs. Valentino, and discussion with the substitute I was able to realize that feminism is demonized thanks to the outspoken minority and that feminism's goals are realistic and should be attainable. As Bell Hooks said,"Future feminist movement will be sustained only if the needs of the masses of women are addressed." So this is a call to action and one that I believe should be worked towards. 

The main thing that I really took away from this week aside from my new stance on feminism is that misconceptions are evil. As I said before, my views on feminism were skewed thanks to the minority being the loudest. I think this can apply to lots of social issues we have in this country today. Just because a small militant group (ISIS) is killing people doesn't mean that all muslims are terrorists, but because ISIS gets the most attention and the most coverage, people are swayed to believe in this. This is exactly what happened to me with feminism, I heard the radical minority because they were the loudest, but I ignored the reasonable majority because they were quiet. 

Civil Disobedience: A Necessity

This week in class we analyzed "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau. The first time I read this piece I was skeptical. I agreed with a lot of things he was saying, such as:"That government is best which governs least", but I also disagreed with him when he encouraged people to openly break the law. Eventually the more and more I analyzed and thought about the matter the more and more I realized he was right. Think about all the change that would not have happened if people didn't participate in civil disobedience. What if Rosa Parks stood up and gave up her seat on the bus? What if the Boston Tea Party wasn't formed and didn't throw tea over the harbor to protest British rule and taxes? What if Susan B. Anthony didn't illegally vote in the house of representatives to protest female disenfranchisement? The point is clear, we would not be as free of a country that we are today without people standing up to unjust laws and breaking them.
Civil disobedience is needed and it is justifiable. Civil Disobedience is needed to publicize an issue. For instance, let's take Colin Kaepernick's actions and the black lives matter movement into account. Without Colin taking a knee and the black lives matter movement forming, there wouldn't be nearly as much talk about police brutality in the country. Thanks to these movements there are measures being taken to help prevent more cases like Freddie Gray from never happening again. There are now cameras that some police forces require their officers to to wear at all times, and there is more dash cameras on police cars. Though, the issue is far from over, without civil disobedience there wouldn't have been any progress made. So all in all, as Thoreau would say; "BREAK THE LAW!"

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.