Blog #17

I was absolutely blown away by "Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meaning of Gender" by Aaron H. Devor.  I have never once thought about how we learn, as young children, to identify ourselves with a certain gender and how long it takes for us to understand what gender to associate ourselves with and how our culture defines gender behaviors.  It takes a long time for us to understand gender anatomically, because at a young age children recognize the genders of people around them on the basis of role information, like clothes or hairstyle instead of physical attributes such as genitalia.  A section of this article that I found particularly interesting was when the author described a study where young, school age children were given dolls and asked to identify their gender.  The majority of the children identified the dolls correctly but on the basis of their hair length or clothing style.  17% of the children identified the gender based based on their primary or secondary sex characteristics.  I think that is truly amazing.  It goes to show how much our culture affects us as young children before we can understand concepts from a more scientific standpoint.  This could also be why many people have trouble accepting that some individuals dress like the opposite gender, according to social norm.

Blog #16

"The End of White America" talks about similar points that "Deconstructing America" discussed, that the white race is soon going to be a minority.  I think for some white people this freaks them out because they are used to being the majority or "superior" to other races.  Throughout the United States history, whites were the ones in charge and there were always more of them than any other race.  Today, the U.S. is much more diverse and your 'status' as a U.S. citizen has to do with your social class and nothing to do with your race.  And in a country that aspires to be post-racial, it is interesting that people are scared or worried about the racial percentages in the U.S. changing so that almost everyone could be considered a "minority".  "We can talk about defining ourselves by lifestyle rather than skin color, but our lifestyle choices are still racially coded" (Hsu 510).  However, we are going into a more diverse world where culture is something we are creating in our own image, and many races can be apart of one culture.
I found that "The Crossing" relates to "The End of White America" because both of them deal with metaphoric lines.  "The End of White America" deals with "the color line" and "The Crossing" deals with the "border line".  For Martinez and many other Mexican Americans, or Mexicans trying to get into the U.S., the line means a lot of things.  Abiding by the line means abiding by the law, but that may not be the morally right decision depending on the person.  Martinez struggled to help a man with diabetes; he couldn't drive him over the line because he would get arrested, but at the same time he wanted to be able to help him cross so he could have a better life.  And Martinez didn't want the man to walk in fear of him not making it due to his medical condition.  So he notified Border Patrol and the hoped the man would be okay and would be able to cross the border eventually on his own. The quote from this passage that really stuck out in my mind was "I tell myself I did the right thing. I tell myself I did the wrong thing. I tell myself that every decision on the line is like that, somewhere in between" (482).

Blog #15 Deconstructing America

This passage was pretty overwhelming and made me question some of my beliefs. I always thought that America was heading in the right direction by becoming more racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse, but according to Buchanan there are quite a few downsides to this.  The one that stood out most to me was the statement that "the greater the diversity, the greater the mistrust".  It's weird for me to think that in this day and age people only feel that they can truly trust those of their own race, I feel like that just disproves how far we have come and that we have been able to move past racism in the extreme sense that it used to be. And then what I found to be very interesting was the long list of all of the horrible events or laws in this country's past that all revolved around the subject of race. "Racial diversity has been the most polarizing issue among us" (469). The Civil War, Dred Scott, riots in L.A. about Rodney King, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.; it was all about race. And Buchanan questions if whether opening up the United States to the whole world is a good idea because of how many issues this country has had regarding race. I sort of see his point but at the same time I disagree. I think it's good that we are becoming even more diverse and that no one race will be the majority. Yeah it'll take some getting used to, but eventually it could really benefit us and make us a more well rounded people.

Blog #14 (yes, we skipped 13)

It's interesting how Jame's mother had so much pride and was so overly protective of her children, that she was incapable of opening up to them and answering their questions regarding their identity.  I guess I understand, given the time period, that she wanted to keep them safe so she sent them to the white, Jewish public schools instead of the schools near by where other black kids attended.  However, I think it is because she sent them to white schools that they were humiliated and hurt more than they would have been if they had gone to the schools in their neighborhood.  The white students and teachers were very racist, and for James this was very hard to deal with.  He was constantly being pushed around at school and eventually found that his only comfort was looking at his reflection in the mirror and pretending the person he saw has a better life than his.  It's really unfortunate that he had to go through all of that and then come home to his mother who can't answer his question "am I black or am I white?".  Not because she doesn't know the answer but because she doesn't want to deal with it.  Though she is proud to have married a black man and had black kids, she is embarrassed to reveal to her children that her Jewish family disowned her and that she has a strong Jewish heritage.  I was angry with her when James asked what a 'tragic mulatto' was and her response was "you're a human being".  Jame's life is so convoluted and all he wants to know is who he is so he can be comfortable in his skin and be able to identify himself and all his stubborn mother can muster is "you're a human being".  Thank you captain obvious, he's a smart kid he knows he's human.  And all of this led to James being ashamed that his mother was white and he didn't want to be seen in public with her anymore.  I found this to be very sad, but I feel like if his mother hadn't tried to raise her children in a bubble full of unrealistic ideals, then that wouldn't have happened.

Blog #12 response to C.P. Ellis

I believe that Ellis would say is just as important as race in determining job placement and occupational mobility.  Even though Ellis was a white man, he was uneducated and very poor which made it almost just as hard for him to maintain a good job or run for a school board position as a black man. An example of his feelings towards this is on page 406: "But I could tell by his handshake he was lyin' to me. This was botherin' me. I know I'm a low-income person. I know I'm not wealthy. I know they were sayin': 'What;s this little ol' dude runnin' for school board?'" It was in these cases that he actually has more support from the black community than the wealthier white folks, despite his past. It was clear that it wasn't enough to be white, you had to have money and connections to win. 

Wednesday, April 4th Assignment - #6 p.461

Fredrickson rejects the claim that an emphasis on ethnic identity threatens the unity and stability of American society because he believes that the best hope for a cohesive society is a "cultural pluralism that is fully inclusive and based on the free choices of individuals to construct or reconstruct their own ethnic identities" (459).  A Euro-American backlash against ethnic diversity poses a greater risk according to Fredrickson because if society remains how it was with an overwhelmingly Euro-American population then ethnic diversity cannot be reached.  I guess a recent example of divisiveness would be the ethnic and racial diversity here at Hofstra.  Though we definitely have a diverse campus, it is still mainly white.  And people of the same race and ethnicity tend to congregate with each other on campus, making it easier to see the divisiveness between the different racial and ethnic groups.  But even though there is a separation, I don't believe that Hofstra or its students are racist.