Talented screen-writer and actor, Jordan Peele, just debuted his new movie Us in theaters last week and the box office went crazy. Jordan Peele is fairly new to the horror movie scene but has come in strong from his 2017 presentation of Get Out which grossed $255 million dollars with a $4.5 million dollar budget. Ever since Get Out, Peele’s fans have been anticipating his newest horror film. Continue reading “Anticipating Repetition in Jordan Peele’s “US” (No Spoilers)”
The Value of Group Work
For the past week in Dr. McCoy’s class we have been doing a collaborative group blog post in small groups of around 5-7. I have also been getting a variety of assignments with group work over the past semester in other classes as well. This led me to have many different experiences while working in multiple group assignments. Over the past semester I have had some good and bad experiences with group collaboration, and it got me thinking about the idea if this is really beneficial for students. I decided to look more into this idea of group work and if it’s effective or not and why.
Sustainability: Generational Impact Seen Through Literature Study
This post has been possible through the collaborative effort made by the following members: Nicole Fyvie, Ian Oxman, Neha Marolia, Molly Byrne, Melisha-Li Gatlin, Emily Tsoi, and myself, Andrew Weber.
The topic of sustainability has been increasingly discussed among the current generation, as the environment is crucial to our existence, and yet, is suffering. Recently in class we’ve started analyzing sustainability and exploring what we can do about it. After a preliminary research, our group found that, “Sustainability focuses on meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” When discussing sustainability, people commonly think of the three pillars which divide the complex issue into social, economic, and environmental sectors. In further research, we found that the three pillars all have different jobs when it comes to sustainability. The social pillar conveys that as citizens in this world, we all have responsibilities to promote and fix social issues such as poverty, human inequality and social injustice. The social pillar involves both saving our planet and also saving everyone on it. We tend to ignore these issues because it may not affect us directly, however, it will impact future generations. The second pillar we learned about was the environmental pillar, which is about saving us from corporate exploitation and neglect. Many people take our natural resources for granted and use them however much one would like. The degradation of the environment and its resources by irresponsible companies negatively affects us all. This pillar attempts to raise awareness on ways to decrease our carbon footprints recommending the use of renewable resources, recycling, and ways to reuse our resources that we already have so we don’t have to keep retrieving more. The last pillar we learned about is the economic pillar. This pillar is about maintaining a healthy balance of our ecosystems by using fair trade and efficient allocation of all of our resources between companies. This is another important pillar because a lot of people in the U.S. are heavy consumers and we consume an abundance of unsustainable products, which is once again increasing our carbon footprints. Continue reading “Sustainability: Generational Impact Seen Through Literature Study”
Is Sustainable Attainable?
Group members: Yadelin Fernandez, Jen Galvao, Michee Jacobs, Maria Papas, Jessica Riley, Courtney Statt, Toby Youngman
The International Institute for Sustainable Development defines sustainable development as, “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” When considering sustainability, there are many markers that determine whether or not an action or means of production is sustainable. The three pillars of sustainability include economic visibility, social equity, and economic viability. According to this definition, something cannot be sustainable unless it meets all three factors. However, this is the question we kept coming back to: is it possible to meet all three of these pillars? It is hard to visualize a solution because we are bound by systems already in place which we may not even know we participate in.
The heating plant is a strong example of a complex system that many people on campus are unaware of but are simultaneously benefitting from. Prior to our visit, none of us had ever been inside of the heating plant, with the smokestack being our only indication that something was there. We weren’t even cognizant of the level of organization that heating a campus takes. As students, we often take for granted that we will be given the heat we need to be comfortable in our daily lives. As a group, this visit led us to consider the layers of production and the ways we passively participate in systems of consumption. Without having considered exactly where our heat was coming from, we also overlooked who was responsible for heating the campus. The quality of our heat is dependent upon the labor of the workers in the heating plant, yet because we operate in different spheres on the same campus, we are unaware of the work that goes into such a process. This is comparable to the interaction between the protagonist and Mr. Brockway in chapter ten of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Before speaking with Mr. Brockway, the protagonist was unaware of the systematic layers that existed in the paint factory. Initially, he assumes the paint is made upstairs, to which Mr. Brockway responds, “Naw, they just mixes in the color, make it look pretty. Right down here is where the real paint is made.” In this instance, the protagonist was only aware of the process that he was shown when he first arrives at the paint factory and has no understanding of things taking place beneath the surface. Continue reading “Is Sustainable Attainable?”
Screen = scan
When talking about questioning quotidian things today in class, my mind went to a seemingly benign everyday habit that I’ve adopted: scan reading.
Everyday, I spend more time scanning emails, Instagram posts, text messages, etc, than I would care to admit. With social media, we are presented with an endless amount of consumable material about any topic that we wish to explore. Because of the frequency and over saturation of words that are seemingly unimportant, I’ve trained myself to scan read. Let’s be honest, does anyone really read though the whole caption for their fourth cousin’s baby’s birthday post? Perhaps even more dangerous than scan reading, I’ve unintentionally devalued words.
Invisible Children
I am currently taking an education class called, “Clinically Rich Multicultural Teacher Education” where we often discuss the importance of creating a multicultural classroom, so that children of different backgrounds feel like they belong and are accepted for who they are. Since many students in the class aspire to become a teacher one day, it is vital that we learn how to promote diversity in our classrooms. Continue reading “Invisible Children”
Hate and Humor
James Arthur Snead was a man who studied English, European fiction and taught courses on modernism and German literature at Yale University.
According to YAMP (Yale Aids Memorial Project), various students and professors expressed how they viewed him as a person and as a professor before he passed away from aids. Two individuals who posted on the page and who knew Snead personally shared deep experiences that they had with him. Peter Schneibner met Snead on a bus during the late 1980s and although he was fond of him and his personality, the experience that he had on the bus through him off. When Schneibner and Snead were on the bus together and on their two-hour road trip their bus driver pulled over for a fifteen-minute break. When Snead got off of the bus to use the restroom for a few moments a man who happened to be white pointed out that Snead was dangerous.
Schneibner shared:
“When he went for a pee, an old white guy sitting in front of me turned around and told me to be careful with the blacks. I should be very suspicious, he warned. A black guy talking in a foreign language can’t be any good, and sitting in the first half of the bus is bad behavior. By law, of course, blacks used to have to sit in the back seats.”
With the information that was shared with him, Shneibner did not change how he viewed Snead which was definitely a positive thing but, I found that that situation was quite funny because the following individual, Mark Schoofs who posted about Snead says, “He had a way of carrying himself so that race wasn’t able to obscure him. He was a visible man, the opposite of Ralph Ellison’s character, but it wasn’t because he acted white or avoided race. Hardly.”
I found humor in the story about the white guy calling Snead dangerous due to his skin color and talent in knowing multiple languages because according to his classmates, friends, and people that he knew, they found that Snead didn’t care much about race. He cared more about the historical events that have to lead us to where we are now or to how things were during the times in which he was alive. It is funny how there are people who want to be hateful or harmful to another person but don’t realize that their hate doesn’t matter much and shouldn’t matter as much as they think it does.
Masks keep you safe
According to the context of W.E.B Du Bois’ story, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” African Americans have been, “born with a veil, and gifted with with a second sight in this American world,— a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”
The story, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” was written in 1903 and Du Bois lived during the late 1860s when slavery was over but if you were black you were still chained to the racist systematic laws that existed and you were constantly surrounded by racist white people. When I say, racist white people, I don’t mean that all white human beings in the United States were racist but, the majority of the people allowed stereotypes to control their way of thinking and because of that, they were even more ignorant than anything. To be ignorant means to not give someone else a chance and to not allowing your self to be open to learning new things because a selfish mindset that you may have.
In class, we interpreted Du Bois’s statement about African American people being born with veils and being gifted with a second sight as living two different lives in a way to fend for their own life. People of color saw this veil as a tool that protected them and allowed them to learn how to act in the society and time period that they lived in and how they should conform to what white people would want at that time.
I titled this post as “Masks that keep you safe, ” because we also discussed the poem written my Paul Laurance Dunbar who wrote We wear the Mask. This poem stuck to me and it took me about an hour to really understand and take in the meaning of the poem. In order for me to truly comprehend the poem, I searched and listen to Maya Angelou’s version of the poem and her combining it with her own. I find that reading a poem verses listening to it serves a completely different effect on how you take it all in. Now, I will say, We wear the Mask is a phenomenal poem that depicts exactly what African Americans went through once they were forced to live by white standards. The lines that stood out to me the most and that I would tie in with W.E.B Du Bois’s line about being born with a veil from“Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” are:
“We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—”
Although the concepts are different the idea of being obliged to cover your true identity for the purposes of satisfying another group of peoples needs is what correlates. As W.E.B Du Bois’ story, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” stated “African Americans have been, “born with a veil, and gifted with a second sight in this American world,— a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”
Having to wear a mask all of the time ties in with the idea of having a second sight to survive in the American world that minorities struggle in. When you wear a Mask or a veil you are yourself behind whatever it is you are covering first. You see everything how you would regularly see things and you would have your original perspective but because of the society that minorities lived/live in they had/have to react differently compared to how they would have wanted/want to react originally to many racially related issues.
Poetry Read vs Time Spent on it
Almost everyone has been exposed to poetry in some form or another. Some throughout middle and high school, some continuing in college for pleasure, others yet pursue it rigorously in a discipline. I think I fall somewhere in the middle, as I have taken courses with Dr. Doggett that include hefty amounts of poetry gone over in extreme detail, yet I don’t consider myself a scholar of poetry quite yet. In reflecting on the poems that we have been given thus far in Dr. McCoy’s class, I find myself not really understanding much if anything about the poetry (further than syntactical content and plot) that we have read, except perhaps #AllyFail by J Mase III as that poem has a strong relation between the content and form that (at least on the surface) gets a pretty clear point across about checking our privilege if anyone is to consider themselves an ally.
I suppose I feel as though I don’t understand the various conversations going on within the poetry that we read in class. I know there could be a whole major devoted to African American Poetry, but I know I’m yearning for a little more when it comes to the time we spend on poetry in this class. In an effort to satisfy that yearning, I’ll attempt to dive deeper into one of the Black Nature poems, namely Kwame Alexander’s “Life”.
For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend- Pat Parker
Within the packet of poems that Dr. McCoy presented to us, a few of them stuck out to me immediately. Similar to what Analiese stated in her blog posts, I would not usually go for poems if I were. There are certain poems, however, such as Pat Parker’s that draw me in almost instantaneously. Parker’s poem gave me a conversational feeling which sparked more of an interest than poems usually do. I found myself making commentary while reading along because I could relate all too well and there were certain aspects of it I found to be humorous.
Continue reading “For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend- Pat Parker”