Blog #5

The Bluest Eye and American Born Chinese have characters that are similar to one another.  For example, The Bluest Eye character named Pecola wanted to be beautiful and she wanted to have blue eyes.  In American Born Chinese Jin Wang wanted to be beautiful and to be white.  He did not want to be Chinese.  Both of these characters were teenagers and they both wanted to fit in with society.

One of the themes in The Bluest Eye is discrimination because at school the teachers and the students treated Pecola differently.  Everyone did not want to associate with her because they thought she was ugly.  She was an outcast in her school.   Another example of discrimination in The Bluest Eye is when Maureen, Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola started to argue with one another.  They started calling each other bad names.

Discrimination is also in American Born Chinese because Monkey King was not allowed to go inside the dinner party because he was a monkey and he did not have shoes on.   Another example of discrimination in American Born Chinese is when Jin Wang was introduced to his new classroom.  His teacher could not pronounce his name correctly.  Also he did not have any friends until Wei-Chen came to his school.  The people at his school would make fun of him because he was a different race than the other people.

Each of these texts relate to power and privilege because it showed that the whites had power over the blacks and Chinese.  Both of these characters Pecola and Jin Wang wanted to be able to fit in with their society.

Blog 4-Unit 2

Our class was assigned to watch two videos.  The two videos are "A Class Divided" and "Mirrors of Privilege."  I thought both of these videos were very interesting and different.  The first video "A Class Divided" was about a teacher in Iowa who wanted to show racism in her classroom.  She told her students that we have the blues eyes on the one side and the brown eyes on the other side.  The first day she did this exercise she told  the students that the blue eyes are better than the brown eyes.  The students turned into being hateful, nasty, and discriminated the other students.  The next day she changed the roles.  The students reacted in the same way as the other group did.  She created a classroom in a society.  These students grew up not to discriminate against the other people because they experience on what it was like to be discriminated.  She did the same exercise with adults.  She was more harder on the adults, so they could feel what is was like to be discriminated.  At the end of the video she mention about using the exercise with teachers and administrative staff.  I would have to agree with this statement because I think it would benefit the teachers and the administrative staff.  Also, I know if the teachers would do this exercise they would have to be very careful not to damage their students.  Overall, I really enjoyed watching this video.

The second video we had to watch was "Mirrors of Privilege."  This video was about people telling their testimonies about racism.  The testimony that affected me the most was in part three.  A teacher yelled at an African American student because she was not listening and she talked back to him.  He felt horrible for screaming and swearing at her in front of his students. I cannot believe that the teacher lost his temper.  This video was very powerful to me because I'm going for elementary education and the one thing that I do not want to do is lose my temper on the students.  If a teacher yells at a student in front of all the other students that has an effect on his or her self-esteem.