In an article by the Crunk Feminist Collective, it discusses a video of a white woman who was getting harassed as she walks down the streets of New York City. The article discusses how the Hollaback video was not only sexist but racist as well. The white men who catcalled the white woman were edited out. Meanwhile men of color are still represented in a “dangerous” way that threatens an innocent white woman. The article also discuses how Black women have the right to occupy public spaces without enduring street harassment. The Hollaback video is trying to alert us to fight for women that are being harassed. However, as the Crunk Feminist Collective article points out, the video should also be used to alert individuals about racism. This video
In Brent Staple’s essay, Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space, he discusses how the black are stereotyped and not in a nice way. The whites’ believe black people are dangerous to their community, that the blacks commit wrong doings and create violence everywhere they go. The author goes through many struggles in his lifetime, for example, people thinking he is a mugger or even worse. Staples writes about his “first victim” to begin his essay, the victim is a white women who is so scared that he is behind her that she sprints off as far as she can. When people see Staples, they immediately assume that he is a bad man, when in reality he is a hardworking man earning everything he has.
The reading this week brought to my attention that historic events have a way of repeating themselves. In Folklore of the Freeway, Eric Avila explains that during the “Freeway Revolt” there were different ways that communities organized and the types of issues they were fighting against. These issues and organization structures mirror current day protests. Likewise, the connections between how women were treated with respect to protests during the “Freeway Revolt” and the recent Women's match are astounding. In the context of these two events, white women are seen as saints for fighting a fight that doesn’t affect them, while women of color as ridiculed for making a big deal out of nothing.
Feminist scholar Audre Lorde has thoroughly documented this phenomenon, having been on the receiving end of white feminist scapegoating more than once. In her speech "The Uses of Anger," which she delivered at a 1981 National Women's Studies Association Conference, Lorde recounts the the times she's been dismissed as "angry" for bringing critiques of racism into predominantly white feminist spaces.
The primary source being analyzed in this article is an article/excerpt posted in a 1988 book. It is called "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack". It was written by Peggy McIntosh. The author is a white female who has lived a fairly gifted and accomplished life. She wrote this article because of her realization that her skin color and gender have both played major roles in the way she's been brought up and treated by others.
Watching Ken Burn’s The Central Park 5, a viewer can easily see the vulgarity and vitriol which fueled the case and think, even hope that this sort of treatment of black and Latino American youths would be intolerable in modern America. This documentary chronicles the case, dubbed by the media as the Central Park Jogger, which involved the violent rape of a white female jogger in Central Park on April 19, 1989 and the wrongful conviction of five boys of color. The jogger, a 28-year old investment banker of the Upper East Side was so brutally beaten that she was in a coma for twelve days, and her assault became a huge media spectacle. This case exacerbated racial tensions in a crime-driven, poverty-stricken New York City, and revealed the prejudices
Copper Sun Essay There is plenty of brutality in the world today. On the news there are many examples of hate crimes. For example, white people are killing people of color, especially African Americans, for little to no reason. In the 14th amendment, women were granted the same equal rights as men, however women are still looked down upon and get treated differently.
The East Los Angeles School walkouts and Chicano Moratorium are two historical examples that emphasize forms of Chicana and Chicano resistance that have been examined in varied ways, particularly through print media such as the Los Angeles Times and La Raza. In 1968 more than 10,000 Chicana and Chicano students walked out of schools in East Los Angeles to protest inferior educational conditions and demand equal access to quality education. Then, in 1970, the Chicano Moratorium, which intended to be a peaceful demonstration to call for social justice and protest the Vietnam war, transformed into a display of police repression and brutality that left several marchers dead. Descriptive material, such as print media, served as instrumental extensions
For people to show up and make their support present. One student spoke about the fear that marginalized groups deal with everyday due to recent events involving hate. She said acts like these must stop. In Barbara Perry’s article, Hate Crimes, she talks about America’s color-coded society. She explains that whiteness has been constructed to be the normal American standard.
Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2009:342) argue in the Du Bois Review that “racism is much broader than violence and epithets” and reveals itself in common, everyday microaggressions. In May 2010, a string of assaults on elderly citizens of Asian descent by black individuals transpired in the San Francisco Bay area (Shih 2010). CBS San Francisco ran a segment covering the attacks featuring an interview with a 21-year-old black man named Amanze Emenike, who had a criminal history of juvenile robbery and theft (CBS 2012). CBS uses Emenike’s history as a basis for theorizing the motives driving the black attackers in the May 2010 attacks. This news segment sheds light on troubling portrayals of black men and people of color in mass media as all being dangerous criminals, as well as the stereotypes fueling racism amongst minority groups.
Brent Staples, in the article “Just Walk On By” claims that there is a growing amount of a racist stereotype that whites, specifically white woman, have against black males. Staples supports his claims by using his own past experience evoking certain emotions of the audience. The author purpose is to retell his experiences of racism and to educate white people about what it is to be a white man, in order to really make them see how they are misjudged just by the occasion based on appearances. The author writes in a fairly calm tone towards his audience in this case, of whites of all social classes, specifically women. Staples use of pathos, diction, and ethos to effectively join his ideas to the thoughts and attitudes of his audience in his collective article.
Today in class, we discussed a topic that is deeply engraved in American history yet widely avoided by many: race. More specifically, terms like “racist,” “All Lives Matter,” and “white privilege,” which may make some people uncomfortable but more than ever, need to be confronted and examined. We watched several videos containing a variety of people discussing their own personal thoughts and feelings on such terms to spark our own conversations on the same topics. After viewing the first video on the word “racist,” I began to reflect on my own actions towards other people.
Free Me: Racist Speech Freedom is a paradox, especially in America. Everyone is free, but everyone must obey laws. In 1776, America chose to fight against her oppressor. Rather than be a single colony, America became a separate country. Today as an adolescent, America faces a new uphill battle, free speech.
In Oryx and Crake, society does not value femininity. Females are seen as weak and subordinate to men, and the arts are disregarded. Crake, who is the alpha male in the novel and sees the world in a pragmatic sense, is representative of the general viewpoint of their society. Jimmy on the other hand, is seen as feminine despite being male due to his empathy and talent for words. By illustrating a world dominated by masculine qualities, Oryx and Crake shows that feminine qualities are essential to society and are innate in humanity.
Kareen Harboyan English 1C Professor Supekar March 15, 2018 Word Count: Crenshaw’s Mapping the Margins: The Marginalization of Women of Color Analyzed Through Generalization and A Feminist Lens Crenshaw's Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color expands on the multifaceted struggles of women of color and the generalizations ingrained in society that limit women of color and keep them in a box. In this text, Crenshaw builds on the concept of intersectionality which proposes that social categorizations such as gender and race are intertwined and have great influence on one another.
Feminist Theory In Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, they recognize the life of the Igbos which are a tribe in the village of Umuofia during European colonization. There are many topics brought up in this book like the effects of colonization, culture and tradition, religion, race, etc. It is relatively easy to read “Things Fall Apart” as an anti-feminist text due to the face that the Igbo clan’s customs and traditions seem to side towards masculine features, such as power and strength. The novel is told through a male protagonist’s point of view in nineteenth century Nigeria, while women there do not have much rights, they do wield heavy influence over the leaders of the clan.