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Showing posts from June, 2018

Response to Callan - Week 10

I really appreciate your thoughts on distinguishing how we talk about "race" and "racial identity." It's interesting that you bring this up, because I've definitely struggled in other history classes about the vagueness of some terms and how race and racial identity are often conflated. I think something that I've really appreciated about this class is the opportunity to get in touch with and look at the experiences of people with different identities. I feel like our discussions have helped me think more critically about information I see every day, in addition to what I've learned from classes in the past. In regards to Sing, Unburied, Sing, I feel that the book brought up further questions for me about what it means to "be" or "become" American. I find myself comparing the book to other works that we've read this quarter, and considering how it is different and similar. Furthermore, I feel that I find leaving this class w...

Week 5 Post MU

Dear Serena Williams, In reality, you should be recognized as one of the most dominant athletes of all time. I purposely make this statement without saying most dominant "female" athlete because you have proven yourself to be one of the greats across gender lines. The public does not recognize your achievements, which is apparent by the comparisons to your mediocre opponent, not rival, in Maria Sharapova. Although you've continuously proven your greatness, it is still downplayed so it can be seen in comparison to your white "counterparts." Your black body has been mocked in 2012 by your competitors. Your black body has been challenged the treatment you knew it needed by doctors who see it one way. Your black body has been criticized in recent days because you still perform at a high level despite being an anomaly to the conventional athletic body norms associated with whiteness. In your attempts to break down barriers surrounding black women, the sport and m...

week 10 response: lingering question(s)

We talk around it, even when we're talking explicitly about it: whiteness. What is it? How does it work? How is whiteness embodied in "non-white" people. How did whiteness come to be intertwined with European people? I think a lot about that evasiveness of whiteness in conversation, even in conversations specifically focused on interrogating it. Sadhana mentioned earlier in the course the real implications of the racial paradox, in reminding us that while race is a socio-political construct, it still has impacts on our lives. We can deconstruct all the fallacies that racism superimposes over our lives as invalid, creepily motivated, and not "technically" real, but yet we still live in a world defined by it? The question of how to address/cope with/understand a concept that in itself is fictitious, man-made in every sense, but still real in the way that it moves and reproduces and consumes people. I feel that the pre...

Week 10 Response

Sing, Unburied, Sing was a harrowing emotional read that forced me to imagine existence beyond the physicalities of life. Through the supernatural and surreal Ward makes the dangers of black life in the United States and historical traumas of Black America visible and omnipresent. The way Ward uses the imaginary to encompass the holistic narrative and context of Jojo’s family’s life is extraordinary. Given that the title of the course is “Racial Identity in the American Imagination ”, and especially after looking more at Claudia Rankine’s work with “The Racial Imaginary”, I have been thinking a lot about the power of creation of ideas. I have a lot of questions, and one thing I really want to learn more about is how contemporary people of color are imagining the possibilities and futures of their identities. I also think that much more historical imagining must be done, and I want to learn about what and how both black and white folks, especially young people, are actively...

Week 10 Response

The great unanswered question for me from the class is the one that was raised in our conversation about Citizen and White Rage. Throughout our discussions (even the discussions themselves) have been deeply concerned with the Foucauldian notion that the power of whiteness is operating everywhere in American life. Insidious and pervasive, white supremacy has wheedled its ways into our thoughts and speech, into our self-conceptions and our plans. It is like a tumor with long tendrils or a virus that has sickened us cell by cell. As Rankine herself said (I paraphrase) "it's killing you guys too (--->and so, all of us then) you dumb motherfuckers."  Citizen is concerned with the ways in which whiteness operates everywhere. The horror of Citizen is it's notion that whiteness is a silent, horribly engrained sickness. Often, its host are unaware of its symptoms. It is nonetheless strangling the hosts themselves and black life indiscriminately and inexorably. Many of the d...

Week 10 Open Letter Question

Dear Class, On this journey of reading narratives and challenging notions of identity, one essential question still lingers in my mind. I don't exactly know how to simply ask this question, it finds itself to be multifaceted in the same sense of all other topics of discussion so far. It is related to the question I asked on the first day of class: How can one escape the perceptions of someone else's reality? Thinking back to how we discussed how people are misidentified, how people pass, and this all relates to the treatment of a given person; who has the final say on identifying people? Indeed a complex question, I want to open this back up for discussion to see if we can get to the root of this issue. It was mentioned that some identities seem to be shaped from whiteness or striving towards whiteness as it currently stands as the "societal standard." Are all identities, from the standpoint of racial imagination, shaped from the notion of how they differ and intera...

Week 10

Come the end of this class, I find myself still thinking about how place, space, and migration funnel into identity formation. In regards to matters of migration, mixed-race identities, and citizenship, for example, I still have a lot to sift through in terms of what it means to be in flux, to be at rest, to be in departure, to encroach upon an arrival, and to be in a comfortable proximity to different types of personal and material security. I am also still curious about racial identity formation as/within a framework of collaboration. Many of our classes engaged with one specific identity at a time. Although minority identities are necessarily woven together by a common struggle for freedom and understanding in various capacities, I am wondering how these different identities actively work to inform each other cross-culturally. We spoke about passing and some of the negotiations and consequences mixed-race identities carry and eject, but that relationship often times seemed told...

Response to Sadhana Week 8

Dear Sadhana, I am fascinated by your idea of the fiction of the work on passing building on the "fiction" (as you point out not a fiction, but an exposure of the fundamental truth of the illusory nature of race itself) of the passing person telling the story of being "a different race," building on the fiction of race itself. I want to apply this idea to the film Pinky. The other, almost surreal, layer in that film is that the actress playing the passing character is white. Thus the audience is asked to add another layer to the layers of fictions that you have already pointed out are already operating in any work about passing. The audience is asked to participate in the 1) the fiction of the work 2) the "fiction" of the story Pinky tells about her race 3) the fact that that "fiction"--the story she is telling--is actually in this case "true" given that the actress playing her is white 4) the fiction of race (which to the 1950s audie...

Make up blog post

Week 4: Response to George Sanchez's Becoming Mexican American Thank you for this meticulous scholarly work, where you attempt to catch identity in the making by you zooming in on exactly those moments where identity is, as you write, becoming.  We see the way an identity is being created in the present: "Ethnicity, therefore, was not a fixed set of customs surviving from life in Mexico, but rather a collective identity that emerged from daily experiences in the United States." Here, we learn that way that categories such as ethnicity are theorized and collectively understood around shared daily experience. They are thus ever constructing and responding to lived experiences. I found the quote that you give from Stuart Hall particularly brilliant at driving this point home: "Cultural identity is a matter of "becoming" as well as of "being." It belongs to the future as much as to the past." By positing that identity is not fixed in an u...

Week 9 Response

Letter to Film Forum Dear Programming Director, I have just seen  The Searchers and am at once astonished and deeply disappointed. I understand why this movie so fundamental to the American cinema. The final shot is, in and of itself, about as elegant as a distillation of the theme of a movie as I have ever seen in a single image. The film is littered with visual mastery. The juxtaposition between the carefully constructed and populated interiors representing the sacred "home" and the shots of the characters positioned against the awe-inspiring largeness of the Western landscapes contributes immerse the viewer in the central questions of the film -- where is the line between the home and "out there" and how much can a domesticated sacred home remain "pure" when manic violence is being committed to keeping it that way. The Searchers, operating in the mode of the classic "Hollywood Western" has much to dislike about it. It goes without saying ...

WK7 Post

Watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s was very interesting because I got a sense of what white femininity was like during the 1950’s and 1960’s. While I thought the movie was very boring, it was interesting to see a white woman who was carefree. The protagonist went to and hosted parties, hung out with random men, and  did not have a job, but she somehow seemed to survive and live a very lavish lifestyle. Seeing the life that Holly lived made me realize how difficult it is to be a black woman. Black women do not have the option to be carefree. Black woman, especially during the time this film was made, did not have men chasing them down in the street, men following them to confess their love, or the option to dedicate their life to finding a rich white man to marry.  These aspects of life that white women like Holly lived are aspects that black woman could never even imagine because of societal structures that place black woman at the bottom of the social and racial hierarchy. ...

Week 10

I'm still hung up on a question that has been somewhat of a specter in our conversations, which is, is the formation of racial identity for people of color always in relation to whiteness? This has come up when we've talked about migration and crossing borders, both within the U.S. and internationally, and when people are granted conditional access to whiteness to further white supremacist projects of hierarchical domination (readings from Sanchez, readings on Asian Americans, discussions on mixed black folks crossing borders and becoming legally white by different states' definitions), or when people are framed in terms of their relation to whiteness, whether that relation is oppositional or proximal. I think my original question/wording could be a little fatalistic, so I'll add another one: how has and can identity formation subvert the dominating effect of whiteness, maybe even or necessarily by working in a different framework altogether? What are these different fr...

WK 10 Post

I took a really dope class this quarter, mom. The class is Racial Identity in American Imagination. This course explored the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented and contested throughout American history. We discussed the lives of Sally  Hemings, black women and men who participated in the great migration, and latinx Americans, and Asian individuals and their experiences in this country. While I was very intrigued by every conversation that took place in class, I’ve been really interested in our discussions about blackness and what it means to be black in America. We read a short article by Toni Morrison “ On the Backs of Blacks” and in this article Morrison discusses the idea that blacks are in fact the “real immigrants”  in the United States and that being black in America means that you are of the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy and the names of immigrants. Reading this article, along with other books from the class, raised several questions fo...

Week 10 Response

As Professor Hobbs named this class "Racial Identity in the American Imagination , " I want to explore the reasons why the word imagination was used. This class could have, in fact, been called "Racial Identity in America." Was imagination used to underscore the fact that race is a construct? Does thinking of racial identity through the lens of imagination color our reading of texts or understandings of the history of race in America? For instance, I think The Hemingses of Monticello would be interesting to think through in terms of imagination in individual actors in comparison to American Racial Imagination as a whole.

Week 10 Response

As someone who studies a lot of American history, one broad thing I am thinking of is how we distinguish the study of "racial identity" from the study of "race" in America. Of course, the two cannot be disentangled, and one logical distinction might be that racial identity allows more space to talk about simultaneous identities or oppressions. Still, I think it is interesting to think about differences between the terms. In a lot of my history classes, we spend time thinking about the historical experiences of different racial groups and how they've interacted with each other. In some of my blog posts/our discussions, we have done the same thing. In this class, by contrast, we are also explicitly focusing on how people and groups throughout history have embraced, rejected, or ignored their or their group's identity. I would be interested in discussing how my classmates perceive each approach, or if they see the difference as I do. I am very eager to ta...

week 10 response: on flight & identity

One unanswered question from all my blog posts revolves around the idea of migration and how it challenges identity by troubling its purportedly stable boundaries. In my week 6 blog post, I wrote about  The Warmth of Other Suns and discussed the ways in which the symbolic figure of the migration and leaving becomes an act of resistance to imposed over determining identities. This week I want to delve further into how, when the body is over determined by an identity that is imposed and imprinted onto it, the act of flight and leaving becomes crucial to forging a resistance. Jakeya Caruthers introduced this concept to me in her discussion of  The Warmth of Other Suns. Since then, I have read about the symbolic figure of flight in resistance movements, focusing on Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and how the flight from the body (or suicide) in the myth known as "the flying African myth" is explored as forging a spiritual freedom --- a travel to the stars --- in resistance...

Quarter Review BlogPost

The thing that I am most struck by going back and rereading my blog posts is how much I have learned throughout this quarter both in class and by doing the readings.  It is sometimes hard for me, in the thick of it, to realize how much it is!  I'm always caught up in the day to day of working, seeing friends, eating, but this class has truly been extraordinary.  The amount and scope of reading (and watching and of course, discussing) we have done is incredible.  I think back to the first day of class, I didn't anticipate how much this class would change me, but it has.  I think I still have a lot of questions.  There are many untied ends. Can someone be transracial and was Rachel Dolezal treated unfairly?  How can we understand the era of our nation's founding today?  How can we write history about it, when there are so many narratives that are virtually impossible to tell with the sources we still have?  How should we treat the Founding Fa...

Week 10 Response

A theme I would like to discuss in our last class is the idea of “becoming American”.   I think it would be interesting to look back on all of the texts we have read and compare how this journey or process of becoming American differs across social, ethnic, and gender groups.   Though the notion of “becoming American” was first introduced to our discussions by George Sanchez in his discussion of the Americanization of Mexican immigrants, immigrants of all backgrounds faced and continue to face similar assimilation efforts.   However, while European immigrants largely were able to “complete” this project of becoming America, blacks, Hispanics, and Asian immigrants often found themselves stuck as second-class citizens. This second-class citizenship is incredibly problematic and the repercussions of such are directly connected to the injustices occurring in our country today (as Jesmyn Ward demonstrates in “Sing, Unburied, Sing”). We must eliminate the idea that someone mus...

Response Week 10

Last week during the "Big Little Lie" presentation, someone mentioned the idea that "mixed" is a type of black, not a type of white. If that's true, then Lacey from the story really would have been passing for white her entire life. However, if we simplify her background (a huge assumption, but just for the sake of argument), to 50% black and 50% white, then she'd have just as much claim to being white as black. One question I have is at what point is someone passing for white if they happen to look white? I don't think I'm explaining this well, but I guess a comparable idea would be someone who is gay not hiding it if someone asks, but also not actively telling everyone they encounter, "Hey, I'm gay." I don't know if that would be an example of someone passing for straight or if that's a case where it's just not relevant in certain scenarios. I personally get very annoyed when someone asks me some variation of "wha...