After doing the blog post assignment for the last 2-3 months, I learned to articulate my own thoughts about the readings each class as well as have an opportunity to see what some of my peers think as well. I think the blog post assignment was particularly helpful. It forces you into micromanaging your time so that you plan when you are going to read/watch videos on the topic of each post. Without the blog posts being due at midnight before class, it also allows the student to read the novel at a gradual pace in order to emphasize on the magnitude of the topics discussed in Oluo’s book. Given that it is our own individual blog posts, I think it gives the students a lot more freedom for how they choose to do their work. Additionally, the individualized blogs emphasize the feeling that you are supposed to express your raw thoughts and sort of form them into an arguable opinion that you can use.

The blog assignments are also a beneficial supplement to the trade-offs of having several papers per semester. It forces you to stay consistent with the readings. With each blog post having a word range between 300-500 words, it allows you to keep writing a decent amount per week without the enormous stress that a paper would entail.

Writing in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences all have different formatting and writing styles. As we dive in the textbook, An Insider’s guide to Academic Writing, we can interpret these different writing styles in their respective fields. The humanities include fashion, art, geography, english, philosophy, and history. All these subjects have a common overlap of explaining how people process and explain the human experience. The current writing style present in the humanities is a stereotypical essay. On the contrast, the social sciences are more geared towards economics, human geography, political science, demography, psychology, and sociology. The social sciences are those subjects which examine and explain human beings. They study human interaction and individualized entities. The main writing style of the social sciences is APA.  Lastly, we have the natural sciences. These include astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry. These are the heavy duty, STEM-induced, subjects in which everyone who doesn’t have some sort of passion towards tend to avoid. These subjects deal with describing the world and the universe around them. They are meant to be precise and accurate. The main writing style is following the IMRAD model. This stands for introduction, method, results, and discussion.

 

Project 2 had us research into the conversation of race within our field of study. At first, being a physics major, I really did not know the specifics regarding the demographics despite having a strong feeling of what they were going to be. As I began to conduct my research, I found out that demographics are ridiculously skewed towards white males and there is an abysmally small amount of minorities receiving a doctorate in this field. The proportions will literally blow you away. Black male and females represent roughly 3% of the bachelor’s degrees in physics and an even smaller percentage of that is represented for the doctoral degrees. I knew prior that the representation was going to be skewed in favor of the white population, but for black people to only have a representation of 3% was an unreal cultural shock. Given that I am also a white male, contributing to this disproportionality.

I, originally, was dreading this project due to the number of annotations required. It was particularly difficult to find many sources that would cover a particular theme in the field. The field of physics is simply not large enough for there to be an excess of sources when you compare it to a larger field like business. However, as I continued to make progress while working on the project it became easier to fit in the criteria needed per annotations, as well as my overall writing quality. As you continue to produce annotations, you learn to write better and more concise within the word count to give off the most relevant information regarding your article. This project was very helpful for the future in my collegiate career simply because now I am more familiar with the writing process. I now have an understanding of how you let ideas formulate from the empirical evidence that I collected while researching for this project.

Project 2 was assigned to all of us to create an annotated bibliography. This annotated bibliography consists of 12-15 sources. These sources are primarily tied to the discussion of race in our majors. For me, I had to evaluate sources regarding the discussion of race in physics. For me, I had to follow the APA formatting because that is the primary formatting used in physics.  Each source was to be an approximation of about 150-200 words. These entries in the bibliography serve as a shortened version to give you a summary of the article and an application towards the thesis of your paper. For the purpose of our class, we are only creating an outline for a paper using the annotated bibliography.

Some of the difficulties of Project 2 have mainly been finding relevant sources that address multiple sides of an argument. With regards to physics, there seems to be one main issue of having it be a predominantly white male field. The causation for this is mainly because people are not exposed to physics enough, and that there is a delineated proportion of men to women in physics classes in higher education. Another issue I have been having is time management, recently I have been busy with test after test it is nearly impossible to find extra time for all the classes. One aspect that is going well is that I am actually developing a very nice outline for the sources that I did come across. I am forming a very well structured argument from the content of my sources. I found this to be such an easier way to complete the assignment. It is so much easier to create a blanket statement over a combination of sources, rather than to pick a concrete topic and find sources that fit under the specific thesis.

The Bechdel Test is a movie based litmus test that assesses the proportionality of women’s cast in films. To pass this test you must have an accurate representation of women in your film. The only criteria for passing the Bechdel Test is to have two or more women in the movie with names, they must talk to each other, and they have to talk about something that is not a man. This test seems very easy to pass but, in reality, there are countless popular movies that tend to fail. Showing the diversity of movies that failed to pass the test, Sarkeesian pointed out that this is a systemic problem instead of an anecdotal issue.

The article from Rioux and the Emmy award winning speech from Davis both participate in the same conversation regarding the Bechdel Test. They both pertain to the Bechdel Test due to their overlapping theme of black women in America not having equal opportunity like everyone else. Davis explicitly says in her speech that, “You can’t win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there,” and “The only thing that separates women of color is opportunity.” The article by Rioux discusses the matter of why men do not read the book Little Women. Rioux argues that men do not attempt to read the book, Little Women, due to its name. However, Rioux puts that, people that do attempt to read the book are taken into the perspective of a women in our daily culture, and that people have been known to respond positively towards this. These two artifacts both further the same conversation due to their arguments representing women’s representation in our society. What the two have in common is that they both argue the only difference between women, including women of color, is the lack of opportunity in the world.

An annotated bibliography is a compiled list consisting of citations regarding books, articles, documents, or artifacts. Each citation is a generally brief description of an analysis of the relevancy your source holds within your article. The main purpose is to give the reader a basic summary regarding the source in the article without the reader having to read the paper.

Mcintosh, Peggy, M.P (1998) White Privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack

The article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” is written by Peggy McIntosh and unveils the reality of continuously checking your privilege as a white person. McIntosh is a feminist, an anti-racism activist, and a woman. In the article she begins with the motion that men are ungrateful for all the power and privilege that they indigenously hold. In our society, men are granted a privilege that is only obtained by them. An example of one of these privileges is being able to run at night with little to no concerns for the environment surrounding you. An argument could be claimed that women experience a more intense rape culture, or other minorities face opposition and harassment from police officers. In Oluo’s novel she acknowledges this on the premise of to “stop pretending to live in a fantasy world” and change is only evident if we come together to treat everyone fairly.

McIntosh, P. (1988). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Retrieved from http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mcintosh.pdf

The video we were assigned to watch is The Black Power Mixtape, by Goran Olsson. In the video they discuss the progress made by the Black Power Movement in 1967-1975. The purpose originates around the oppression of primarily black people and overall minorities, The oppressed group wanted to push back and retaliate against the white population. It uses civil rights activists as a main vocal point in the illustration of persecution and mistreatment of black people in America. This connects to Oluo as she also relates modern racial problems in the world with connections to famous civil rights activists like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

My only difficulty with the assignment is to try to condense the message both of these pieces contain to a threshold of 100-200 words. In an annotated bibliography its main purpose is to deliver the message clearly in as short amount of words as possible. For Project 2 I think this was primarily helpful in the overall formatting of the assignment. The best way to learn a new topic or concept is to dive into it and get familiar with it.

Project one has provided me an insight i could not have acquired without the vitality of this class. Since the first day of classes we have been learning and cultivating a various set of skills that will help us sometime in the future. Project one was an application to the plethora of skills we obtained. I chose the movie ’42’ starring Chad Boseman. Boseman plays Jackie Robinson and takes you through Robinson’s journey of integrating the game of baseball. Robinson was constantly harassed, abused, mocked, and threatened on numerous occasions. The goals of project 1 were to (1) learn to discuss race in conversations outside scholastic or professional contexts and (2) employ rhetorical analysis for a meaningful argument about pop culture. By finishing Oluo’s book I felt much more comfortable on how to approach the assignment as opposed to starting it at the beginning of the semester. Oluo’s book thoroughly goes through and reveals all of the “gray areas” that the majority of the populous are afraid to address.

This knowledge is crucial to our development as student’s of Fairfield because it can be directly linked to Fairfield’s mission statement. The whole point of the core curriculum rather than only taking specific courses designated to your major is to create a well rounded individual. In a growingly progressive society it becomes more and more imminent to learn to address different cultures and situations from their specific perspectives. If we had a large portion of people that were only proficient in their specific fields of work our society would be completely set up for failure.

What I need to do personally in the future is reconsider my viewpoints on other contemporary arguments with the goal of either strengthening my position or switching my side on the arguments completely. The only way to accomplish this is to lay out all of the empirical evidence at hand and re-evaluate based off your own principles and to not be influenced by any third-party sources (in regards to potentially overpowering influences from parents, teachers, friends, etc).

In this reading of Oluo’s book we discuss the usage revolving around the n-word. She discusses in vivid detail her first time being called this derogatory term. She clues you in on the emotional trauma that has since been with her after that incident. The n-word does not simply just have a Webster’s dictionary definition. The n-word brings centuries of oppression and to ignore that is to be blatantly ignorant. It is impossible to use a word without acknowledging the years of terror and torture that it has caused. During the time period where slavery was legalized, the n-word was explicitly used to spread hatred.

Although this word was discussed and defined explicitly within Oluo’s chapter in her book, Coates uses a more visual analogy to indicate to white people the full meaning behind the word. In the video, Coates is faced with a question, from a white audience member, regarding the fact that the n-word is used in popular rap culture and that she should be able to say it. Coates brilliantly takes this situation and spins it into taking a trip into the life of a person of color. He relates the white woman not being able to use the n-word, even though it is in songs that are constantly played on the radio, as a microcosm of everyday life of a black person being discriminated against and not always being able to participate in everything.

This is particularly applicable to the learning we do in this class because it contributes to the common theme of spreading awareness towards sensitive subjects. Oluo and Coates do an excellent job of spreading awareness to walking a couple in the shoes of an entire other race that has been walking countless miles being oppressed and discriminated over the hundreds of years.

Given the sensitivity surrounding racism, Oluo’s book serves more as instructional and to be informative so that we can finally progress the stagnant state of the conversation of racism. Oluo’s purpose for her novel is to equip people with the skills to progress the conversation. By the end of the novel she wants to empower the reader. The usage of questions as the name of the chapter titles offers a far more warm and inviting feeling to the book for those that find the conversation as intimidating. Oluo invites you into a life story where she addresses the hardships while trying to make ends meet. Oluo brings you into her life to build a connection, then she begins to use her examples to talk about sensitive topics in a very constructive manner. She addresses that it is okay for you to feel uncomfortable which gives a very accepting feeling.

A unique part of Oluo’s writing style is her active patience. She is very respective when it comes to addressing strong and heavy topics and her constant reassurance is comforting. Her usage of examples of common mistakes when discussing race are rather eye opening but after she lays out the perspective of being oppressed it is very easy to understand. For instance her list of addressing the arguments is very effective in showing the common mistakes people make. The facts she uses in her writing add a lot of shock value. “Studies have shown that if you have a “black-sounding” name, you are four times less likely to be called for a job interview” (Oluo 115) this statistic addresses a variable that most people do not recognize. Oluo’s theme of spreading awareness is admirable and inspiring.

In chapter five of Oluo’s book we start to discuss intersectionality. Intersectionality, as Oluo describes it, is “the belief that our social justice movements must consider all of the intersections of identity, privilege, and oppression that people face in order to be just and effective” (Oluo 74). This is explaining that you have to acknowledge the plethora of identities that are within each individual. If we want to come to the root of all the issues in an effective manner it is impossible without intersectionality. It plays a crucial implicit role in our everyday lives that is brushed over by society. Ramsey explains this very vividly by using a very effective visual model of feminist women and subsequently dividing into subsections of women in categories like age, race, women of color, transgender, etc. One aspect that I noticed during Ramsey’s video is that they were very objective in explaining the definition of intersectionality. They began broad using the feminists movements as a whole for their example and even criticized the feminist movements for “having a bad habit of leaving behind” when referring to the vital sub-categories of women. Later following up with “how are you supposed to have a movement supporting women if it is not for all women.” A prime example of intersectionality in pop culture today would be the cliques that are inevitably created in high school. People of different personalities, hobbies, ambitions and such all organically formulate into microcosms of a group identity.

I find intersectionality to be inseparable when having an argument with a comparable magnitude and complexity of racism. It is very useful and it does have its respective time and place for it to occur. However, I think it is counterproductive when individuals begin to exaggerate and get carried away with specific systematic oppressions to which there was no proof to begin with. In the midst of today’s social environment it is important to have confidence and not cower or hide behind a hypothetical front as an excuse to stay away from confrontation. In my opinion, to keep a functional and efficient society in place, one should accept and embrace their role of responsibility in the world.