Class and neighborhoods

Tonight during dinner my family and i began telling stories about when my sister and i were younger. One story came up about my older sister asking a very innocent question after we moved from Evanston to Wilmette. We had moved from a school with a 60:40 ratio of white people to black people, to a school where you could count all the black students on one hand. The question she asked is, "where are all the black people?" My parents had a hard time explaining the answer to a six year old "color blind" child. My parents tried to explain to both me and my sister the reasoning but we could not understand why. They told that certain groups of people liked to live in neighborhoods with other people of their group. I was puzzled by this statement but went along with it because i agreed with whatever my parents said. i now am older and more aware of differences in class and its relation to race. People like to live in nieghborhoods around people with a similar socio-economic status.

Junior Theme

I have narrowed down my Junior theme topic to violence in young americans. Violence in schools is increasing a lot in schools. When a friend of mine told me chicago public schools all have metal detecters at the doors I realized how large of an issue is in this country our own city. Also a recent shooting at NIU involving a number of college students shows there is a growing problem in the US. I Found a good book which focuses on violence in schools. Im pretty happy with junior theme so far and I am finding my topic pretty interesting. Also, the librarians have been very helpful in helping me find my materials.

Reparations

The two articles we read were two people's points of veiw on reparations to black people whos ancestors were slaves. In the first article the author Mark Brown, a Sun Times columnist. His main point in his article is that people think of slavery being something in ancient history but in reality it is only a few generations away from us. He went through his family tree and discovered that his family owned slaves at one point. He does not believe he owes anyone money for what his "great-great-great-great-grandfather" did. The other article "The Case for Reparations" the author is Charles j. Ogletree jr. This author believes in reparations for blacks whos ancestors were slaves. He believes that the reparations made should not be "in the form of individual checks." but rather in communities where "damage has been most severe."

Out of these two articles i most agree with the second article. I believe there should be some type of reparations for people whos ancestors were slaves. I dont think that all white people whos ancestors owned slaves should have to write a check to a black person whos ancestor were slaves but rather there should be donations from anyone who would like to contribute. The money should go into rebuilding poor black communities becaus they are the ones who need money. In the second article the author says the money should benifit poor people not "the Tiger Woodses and Oprah Winfreys." I also believe that money shouldnt be the only type of reparations. Things such as afermative action allows more black people to get into college allowing them to have more job oppertunities and financial success.

The Glory of War

Sometime this weekend i was watching a show on the History Channel called Dog Fights. The show is not about dogs fighting rather the term used to describe air plane battles. This episode of the show was about kamakazi pilots in world war two. Kamakazi pilots were pilots whos missions were suicide plane bombings. The pilots would fly their planes into aircraft carriers destroying the ship and potentailly killing many. While watching the show i was wondering what in the world would compell people to do this. There were people on the show being interveiwed who were kamakazi escorts. Their job was to fly with the kamakazis and protect them from being shot down befor hitting their target. The escorts described the job of a kamakazi was the most honerable job in the war. I thought this related to the movie we watched in class. In the movie the 54th regiment was going into battle and they knew the majority of the men were going to die. Even though they knew they were going to die they marched to battle because they believed they were dying honerably for something they believed in and fought for. Im not sure i could ever be as brave as these men in either situation but what pushes someone to feel so strongly about something they are willing to die for it?

Presidential Race(ism)

Race has played a large role in the election so far but a new story has caught my eye. This picture has been a very popular discussion topic recently. This picture is of Obama in a traditional kenyan outfit during a visit to Kenya. The picture has been all over the news and the Clinton campaign has been accused of publisizing it. While watching the morning news on CNN they were talking about the photo and one of the newspeople said he was wearing some type of muslim religious turban. This is an example of how people generalize people. the person on CNN knew muslims wear turbans but didnt know other cultures wear turbans. It was just an ignorant comment that was not well thought out. Barack has been critisized before because of his heritige and even childish things like the fact that his name rymes with osama. I just think it is rediculus how people can make such general statements. One reason why i like Obama so much is because he ignores things like this. Obama is not just running on his race, he is running on his political veiws.

Censorship

Today in class we watched a movie about the controversial part The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn plays in schools and libraries all over the country throughout many time periods. Many people in the documentary were upset that the book was mandatory reading in school. They were upset because the book uses the word "nigger" many times throughout the book. People in the documentary were claiming that Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was a racist because of his excessive use of the word. I feel that even though the people believe that Twain was a racist they should still read the book so they can interpret for themselves. The people protesting the use of the book in schools claimed that it was degrading to have to read about their people's past. I have not yet read the entire book so I cannot make my own opinions but from what other people have said in the documentary Twain was not a racist. In fact he was using the questionable language and portraying the black people the way he did to make a point. Another belief that I have is this, a word is a word. In the case of This book the word is nigger. This word holds a VERY strong negative connotation and can hurt many people. However, the only way to get rid of the negative connotation is for people to be exposed to it so they become immune to it. For example, when I was younger I used to gasp every time I would hear someone say "damn" I would react this way because first, I was taught it was a bad word and second because I hadn't been exposed to it. Now that I have been exposed to the word a lot it no longer upsets me. All in all I am very exited to read this book.

Ending the war

Recently a huge anti-war group stopped trying to cut funding for the war because they are now aware we are too far into the war to pull out now. Instead the groups are trying to prevent Bush from making a long lasting agreement with Iraq which may mean we will have troops in Iraq for many years. I think this is a really great thing that these groups are doing. The groups were not being very succesful in blocking funding for the war so they decided to try stopping Bush from doing another terrible thing. The groups are still fighting the funding of the war which is great because the US is spending eight to ten billion dollars a month. Imaging what our country could do with that extra money!