1A Week 9 Spring 2020:
Week 9 Lessons for the following:
“Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class”
“When GoFundMe Gets Ugly”
Zoom 1A Agenda 4-20-20: “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class”
Essay Assignment 3 due April 27. Be sure to have a minimum of 2 sources and an MLA Works Cited page.
Option A:
In a 1,000-word essay, compare Dr. David Pilgrim’s Jim Crow Museum explanation of Jim Crow laws of yesterday to Childish Gambino’s exploration in “This Is America” to Jim Crow exploitation today. You may consult “Hidden Meanings” video, Dr. Lori Brooks’ Hidden Meanings video, “Childish Gambino’s Genius Absurdity,” and PBS analysis. Your claim will be to address the argument that Jim Crow still exists or not today.
Suggested Outline for Option A
Paragraph 1: Summarize the YouTube video presentation of the Jim Crow Museum. You might focus on the history of Jim Crow as a misinformation campaign to saturate minds with racist ideas that dehumanized black Americans in the service of promoting the false religion of white superiority.
Paragraph 2: Transition to Childish Gambino's "This Is America" video by arguing that the video presents a narrative that shows Old Jim Crow from the museum still exists today in the form of New Jim Crow. You are in essence comparing the Jim Crow Museum video to "This Is America" video.
Your Body Paragraphs Focus on Parallels Between Jim Crow Museum and “This Is America” (Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0)
You should address the following parallels for your essay's body paragraphs: 3-8:
Paragraph Three. Normalizing violence against African-American community as seen in both videos.
Four. White America consumes black culture for entertainment (depending on all variations of minstrel stereotypes) while turning their back on social injustice as seen in both videos.
Five. White America uses guns as a form of oppression against the African-American community as seen in both videos.
Six. White America exploits African-Americans as a form of entertainment in the form of violence as seen in both videos .
Seven. Both videos show that black America wears a dual mask to survive in America: a happy entertainment face on one hand and the horror of violence and being gaslighted everyday on the other.
Eight. If you want, you can have a contrast paragraph: Childish Gambino addresses the use of American consumerism a technology ("This is a celly" and the worship of bling) is a distraction for all Americans, regardless of skin color, from racism, violence, and white-ethnic fascism, which is spreading throughout America and the world.
Paragraph 9, your conclusion is your thesis restated with emotional power.
Special Note: No Counterargument
Option B
In the context of the John Oliver Confederate Flag critique video, defend or refute Oliver’s claim that Civil War figures should not be memorialized in the public square but relegated to museums and history books. For research sources, consult Jamelle Bouie’s “Remembering History as Fable” and Jack Schwartz’s “It’s Time for the Lost Cause to Get Lost.”
Suggested outline for supporting or refuting John Oliver's claim that Confederate memorials should be abolished or relegated to history books and museums.
Paragraph 1: Summarize Jack Schwartz’s “It’s Time for the Lost Cause to Get Lost,” or you can summarize the Vox video "How Southern Whites Rewrote Civil War History" and then you pivot to the fact that Confederate memorials are remnants or residual artifacts giving homage to The Lost Cause.
Paragraph 2: Develop your thesis that supports or refutes John Oliver's claim that Confederate memorials should be abolished or relegated to history books and museums.
Paragraphs 3-6 should address the following arguments:
Arguments Against Confederate Monuments:
One. The Lost Cause is a pernicious myth that finds continued life in these monuments. Allowing The Lost Cause myth to survive gives credence to a blasphemous narrative about the sins of the past, attributing glory to the days of slavery and Jim Crow when shame is due.
Two. We have no comparisons of other countries erecting monuments in the name of their atrocities. For example, Germany does not have Nazi statues.
Three. These monuments indulge narcissistic wounds of the lost fight for slavery; rather than indulge such self-pity, compassion should be reserved for the true victims of slavery and Jim Crow, not the perpetrators. Such an indulgence is a moral perversion and a moral abomination.
Four. These monuments give at the very least tacit glorification and approval of racism when in fact these atrocities should not be met with glorification and “honor” but rather repentance.
Paragraphs 7 and 8 should address the following two of the following three counterarguments:
Counterargument #1: "These monuments should not be taken down because they are history and "honor" the brave warriors that stood up for the South."
Counterargument #2: "If we start taking down Confederate heroes, where do we stop? Do we also take down statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? You're taking us down a dangerous slippery slope?"
Counterargument #3: "Why must we focus on these Confederate memorials? What about all the other social injustices of the world? The high cost of college? Global warming? Immigration rights? I'm just saying."
Paragraph 9, your conclusion, should be a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Option C
Read bell hooks’ essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” and “Keeping Close to Home” and develop an argumentative thesis about hooks’ contention that social class can be an impediment to climbing the educational ladder.
Option D
Read Rachel Monroe’s essay “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly” and develop an argumentative claim that supports or refutes Monroe’s claim that the appeal of GoFundMe is based on an over simplistic narrative that conceals unsavory contradictions and complexities.
Today’s Zoom Presentation Transcript and Meeting ID (4-20-20)
Meeting ID for Zoom: 937-6969-4669
Option C
Read bell hooks’ essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” and “Keeping Close to Home” and develop an argumentative thesis about hooks’ contention that social class can be an impediment to climbing the educational ladder.
Overview:
Growing up in an economically-challenged, religious family had a huge impact on how bell hooks and others from her economic class looked at higher education.
One, In hooks’ essay, there is an Us vs. Them mentality.
“Us” refers to the close-knit family with strong religious values.
“Them” refers to the Gone-to-Hell World of blind ambition, materialism, a cesspool of immorality.
Two, there was a conditioned instinct from her parents to lower her aspirations, not raise them, a mentality that “I don’t deserve the best. I just need to get by.” A message she receives over and over from her parents: “Know your place.”
Three, college is about raising your expectations and “getting a better life,” and bell hooks finds that embarking on this quest creates an implicit condemnation of her parents: “What you gave me isn’t good enough. I need something better.” They feel hurt that what they gave her wasn’t good enough.
Four, college is about branching out, exploring new political and philosophical ideas, and in many ways becoming a new person.
Going to college entails learning a new language, an academic way of speaking, which results in a new way of seeing and describing the world.
Imagine, for example, a college student comes home from college for Thanksgiving and she starts saying things at the dinner table she’s never said before. She starts saying words like--
Patriarchy
Intersectionality
Nonbinary cultural fluidity
Hegemony
Cultural appropriation
Misogynistic
Her parents would be like, “Whoa, what happened to you? I don’t even know you, man.”
From bell hooks’ perspective, this threatens her parents. They don’t want to lose their child. They want her to stay close to home, and be a continuation of them, share her beliefs, their mentality, their perspectives on life. But acquiring a new language means a new self, and a new self entails the end of the former self.
Parents idealize Child 1.0, and they are afraid of Child 2.0.
You go to college so you can transform from Person 1.0 to Person 2.0.
Some parents want to cling to their children rather than let them go and be free.
I had a student for example who would try to do her homework and her mom would, “I’m lonely. Talk to me,” and my student would respond, “I’m trying to keep up with my studies, Mom,” and her mom would say, “Don’t you still love me?”
Five, going to college is about ambition, and ambition is about materialism. From her parents’ perspective, ambition is sinful, and will take their daughter’s eyes away from their religious values.
Five, bell hooks makes it very clear that coming from a low economic background makes her feel ashamed in the presence of rich, entitled people who act like the world was made for them. She constantly feels like she doesn’t belong.
Read bell hooks’ essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” and “Keeping Close to Home” and develop an argumentative thesis about hooks’ contention that social class can be an impediment to climbing the educational ladder.
Suggested Outline
Paragraph 1, your introduction: explain bell hooks' emotional wounds, guilt, lamentation, and ambivalence she has toward higher education--both for others and herself.
Paragraph 2, your thesis, support or defend the claim that bell hooks' lamentations and misgivings about higher education are misguided. Can we sympathize with her emotional scars, or should we criticize her, a person who is now part of the upper middle class, complaining about her lot in life?
Paragraphs 3-6: Address the following
Argument One: bell hooks frames college success as "selling out," but what about framing success in a different way: adaptation and self-transformation in the service of surviving and joining a higher economic class?
Argument Two: bell hooks spends a lot of time in her essay, pouring out her grief, guilt, and lamentations, as if the essay were a source of great catharsis; however, some might argue that she is simply engaging in meaningless masochism: Her self-hatred and guilt aren't helping anyone.
Argument Three: We can concede bell hooks' point that college is about the materialistic ambition of climbing the economic ladder. There is no way to massage that fact; however bell hooks has the luxury of lamenting materialism from her luxury home, Mercedes, and swimming pool situation, which when you think about it, is an absurdity.
Argument Four. While we can concede bell hooks' point that we should not surrender the morality given to us by our parents, we should let our students know that success and adaptation to higher education requires to a certain extent that we die to our old life, our past, our old connections. Death and rebirth are part of the life cycle, and if we resist this fact of nature, we are doomed to a life of stagnation and paralysis.
Paragraph 7: Your counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8: Your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis
bell hooks convincingly shows in her personal narrative that climbing the education ladder entails a sort of necessary betrayal of one's working class roots evidenced by _________________, _________________, ______________, and __________________.
Sample Support of Hooks
What some might call a "betrayal" in bell hooks' narrative is no betrayal at all. Rather, bell hooks takes on the arduous journey toward reasonable self-preservation and self-interest evidenced by her responsibility to be true to her intellect, her responsibility to nurture a career that matches well with her strengths, and her responsibility to steer away from those who are content with small-town tribalistic stagnation so that she can spread her wings and fly.
Sample Essay Response That Agrees with bell hooks
College should be a place that champions the humanitarian spirit, embracing the struggle of those who suffer under the weight of the elites, the privileged class. However, as Bell Hooks convincingly argues, college perpetuates class and sometimes racial elitism, tacitly scorning the working-class while adulating the privileged elites evidenced by the professor’s indoctrination of the students to act and be privileged, the pressures to disown one’s working-class family and community, and the rich students’ contempt for the poorer students.
Sample Essay Response That Disagrees with bell hooks
While I sympathize with bell hooks and would defend her against anyone, teacher, student, or otherwise, who would discriminate against her on the basis of her race or economic class, I find that her condemnation of the elitism she identifies at college to be misguided. The role of the college should be to teach students to lift themselves up from their lower class and into a more privileged class. That’s the point of going to college, to go from a lower station to a higher station in life. Secondly, having these ambitions doesn’t make us anti-humanitarian or contemptuous of the lower classes. We simply want to work toward a place of more privilege. That’s normal human nature that addresses the Darwinian, often brutal realities we face in this world. bell hooks has the luxury as someone who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to decry the privileged class, but she needs to face the fact that she belongs to that privileged class and she worked hard to get there. Finally, bell hooks does a disservice if she doesn’t tell students from the working class the hard truth about succeeding at college, which is that to be successful we must disavow ourselves of our past, even if it means separating ourselves from our working-class parents and community, even if our abandoning that family and community, as bell hooks herself did, gives us shame and guilt, because that separation is essential for becoming reborn as an empowered member of the privileged class who is now in a position to help our family in ways we never were before.
Response That Refutes the Above
The refutation of bell hooks under the claim that we must sell our souls to the devil in order to be successful is a grotesque absurdity misinformed by the blind ambition of class privilege, a convenient worship of Darwinian self-centeredness, and a failure to acknowledge that we can enjoy the joining the privileged ranks without disavowing our past identity, family, and community.
Response to the Above Refutation
I never claimed we should sell our soul to the devil and engage in Darwinian self-centeredness. My argument, contrary to the one misconstrued above, is that to embrace the new life of college, its ideas, its knowledge, its new identity, and yes the privileges that come with higher learning, we must go through the excruciating process of dying to our old self, the very self that was raised in our working-class homes and communities and that this process of dying and being reborn again is the very process that bell hooks admits to going through in order to become the success she is today.
"Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class" PDF
One. What did Hook’s mother teach her about desire in the mother’s attempt to quell the appetite for unaffordable things?
Whenever Bell Hooks expressed desire for even simple things like a yellow dress, she felt belittled and learned to distrust her desires and bury them. The instinct to desire things is considered inappropriate in part because to express desire for nice things is to fail to "know one's place."
To show desire for what you don't have is to say your family hasn't provided enough. You're expressing hunger for more, a desire to branch out, and a family may feel threatened by this, especially if the family is tight-knit, working class, and scrupulously religious.
Bell is raised to believe that knowing her place is equal to suppressing her desires.
The implicit message is that since she is of the lower classes she has to know her place and have no sense of entitlement. She must remain modest. She must be happy in life with life's bare minimum.
Knowing her place in the social hierarchy is about being apologetic about her existence.
Stay within the walls of your existence and curb your desires. Stay close to home, stay close to family, hold tight to your hard-fought moral values. Failure to do these things will result in moral disintegration.
To have desires for anything above one's station in life is considered impolite.
We can only imagine what this would do to her psyche.
That would drive me crazy to want something and to develop this reflex to immediately say I don’t actually want it.
Hooks’ save-money mentality followed her into college where money had to be first considered above all else.
To be religious, from her family's point of view, is to be happy with one's lot, is to be modest, and to shun the idolatry of materialism.
Hooks' parents are making a faulty equivalence of materialistic idolatry and making a better life for oneself through higher education.
Knowing One's Place Vs. College Ethos
In college, the ethos is to strive for better things, to climb the social and economic ladder, to reap the fruits of one's hard efforts.
Opposite of knowing one's place, college is for destroying one's old place and replacing it with a far superior one.
Therefore, Bell carries this conflict of emotional baggage with her to college.
Class Shame
Bells' mother teaches her daughter that she doesn't fit with the morally dubious uppity people in part because she finds them threatening, but also she feels a sense of undying inferiority and shame for her poverty.
American Myth of Virtue
In America, a perverse mythology surrounds wealth and poverty. Wealth is associated with virtue, hard work, and noble character while poverty is linked to laziness, moral deformity, and self-destructive pathology. Therefore, wealth carries a desirable aura while poverty is infected with a stigma.
This state of affairs is uniquely American. In Europe, for example, wealth is often associated with lucky rich kids who inherited their wealth from their parents and who may be spoiled, entitled brats. Poor people may be looked upon as victims of a corrupt system. Such people deserve sympathy, not scorn.
Class Shame in College
During Hooks’ first year in college, she realizes a lot of her mother’s fears are rooted in class shame, the disgrace of not measuring up in the presence of “real classy people.” Sadly, we live in a society where the lower classes suffer an inferiority complex because they don't "measure up" to the higher classes.
Poverty is a contagion, an infection, a disease that must be avoided. Therefore, middle-class college kids may consciously or unconsciously ostracize students of modest economic means.
College Threatens the Moral Order
Anything that branches out of the tribe's rigid ways is looked upon as a threat to the moral order. Going to college is a threat to a lot of families who don't want to disrupt tradition and routine. Tribalistic conformity becomes the key to happiness. This theme is illustrated in a masterpiece short story "The Country of the Blind" by H.G. Wells.
Two. What happens to Bell Hooks in college?
She is isolated by the white girls who look at her in horror and disdain for being black and for being not rich. “Not only are you black; you’re not rich. Stay away from us, you pariah.” She becomes La Otra.
Like her childhood, Hooks was learning to be apologetic about her existence. "Sorry I don't fit in, rich girls. I'll try to stay out of the way."
Her existence becomes one of self-abnegation or self-erasure: “If I want things and if I feel overcome by loneliness, then too bad. I have to suffer. My existence is not worth these considerations. My needs mean nothing compared to these rich white girls.”
Bell Hooks sees the world as binary:
The haves and the have-nots. Those who live in glorious gardens with grass and trees and those who live in the scorched weeds.
Bell Hooks connects with one white girl who like Hooks is financially challenged. She is a Czechoslovakian immigrant with modest means. The two of them together become Las Otras.
Binary View of the World: Haves and Have-Nots
In 1978 when I was training at the gym, a 300-pound powerlifter scrutinized me with piercing eyes and told me "there are only two kinds of people in the world, homeowners and renters." And then he spit behind his back before bench pressing 500 pounds like it was a feather.
Unlike Hooks, though, the Czech girl has contempt and envy for the rich white girls. She desires their riches and resents them for having what she lacks.
In contrast, Hooks’ religious upbringing taught her to be leery of excess, of pride, of loving riches for their own sake.
Three. What finally sets off Hooks’ rage toward the rich white girls?
When they perform their ritual of trashing someone’s room and it ends up being Hooks’ room, Hooks is enraged that these rich narcissists cannot consider that someone with modest finances cannot easily replace all the items that were ruined during the trashing.
The rich girls’ lack of empathy and their failure of imagination stirs Hooks’ deep loathing for them.
Adding to her contempt is Hooks’ refusal to want to be white like them and to aspire to behave like a vain privileged white girl.
Her contempt for these immature white girls compels Hooks to go to a real college, Stanford, which will test her parents’ class anxieties. Her parents will hide behind religion and say that Stanford, which is in California, is sinful.
Four. What does the essay teach us about education?
To succeed in education, we have to break the bonds with our class identity and this can be excruciating if our class identity is tied up with our parental identity.
Time and time again, we read of college students who don’t succeed until they break from their parents’ and communities’ class influences and this break is often seen as a betrayal and it results in guilt. But it is necessary.
As a working-class student attends college, the following separation occurs with family:
One. The student separates from parents by virtue of self-isolation for the service of study or moving out of the house altogether.
Two. The student takes on a new language that his or her parents don't understand. Parents will feel their children have become "smarty pants college students" who talk down to their parents using the following pretentious words and expressions:
intersectionality
structural inequality
patriarchal
faux pas
apropos
indubitably
bourgeois
vis-a-vis
paradigm
milieu
per se
whilst
toxic masculinity
woke
hegemony
liminal (transitional stage)
incipient
inchoate
embryonic
elucidate
obfuscate
marginalization
contextualize
verisimilitude
surreptitious
mediated
Zeitgeist
juxtapose
non sequitur
tres chic
teleological
subjugate
reciprocity
dialectic
dichotomy
multifaceted
predicated
dearth
circumvent
correlative
causation
bifurcate
binary
demarcate
delineate
patina
festoon
schadenfreude
Weltanschauung
Three. The students take up political and philosophical value systems that may be more aligned with their professors and conflict with their parents'.
Five. What cynical worldview does Hooks observe at Stanford?
Her white roommate, a poor girl from Orange County, believes in the religion of privilege: “Cheating was worth it. She believed the world the privileged had created was all unfair—all one big cheat; to get ahead, one had to play the game. To her, I was truly an innocent, a lamb being led to the slaughter.”
Hooks isn't prepared to play the game because playing the game means selling one's soul to the devil.
For Hooks' roommate however the only devil to worry about is being poor.
Six. What does Hooks conclude about the manner in which students must adapt to college?
Hooks writes: "Slowly, I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality."
In other words to assimilate into the privileged, educated class, we have to embrace their language, attitude, demeanor, characteristics, body language; in other words, we have to die to our former self, disavow our past, and become a new person born in a world of privilege.
This new privilege becomes evident in the way we speak, write, and affect our body language. We develop a certain superciliousness and hauteur (uppity, proud, self-regarding expression that says, "I'm all that").
Hooks is tormented by the above fact not only because it's true, with all of its questionable moral implications, but because Hooks went through the process herself even as she questioned it. She became an "upper class intellectual."
At best when we transform from working class to privileged educated class, she writes, someone like her will suffer contradictions, having a remnant of her past identity and a new identity based on privilege.
“When GoFundMe Gets Ugly” Study Questions & Writing Strategies
This presentation contains:
Study Questions
Sample Outline
Two Sample Thesis Statements
Option D for Essay 3, Due April 27
Read Rachel Monroe’s essay “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly” and develop an argumentative claim that supports or refutes Monroe’s claim that the appeal of GoFundMe is based on an over simplistic narrative that conceals unsavory contradictions and complexities.
Study Questions
One. What kind of narrative appeals to us that is a common theme in GoFundMe?
We love stories of compassion and transformation. We love the idea that someone “with nothing” like Chauncy Black can go to a rich supermarket, meet a kind “angel,” and find positive change in his life.
Matt White is a story of transformation through compassion. By being moved to help Chauncy Black, Matt experiences a spiritual rebirth.
The human soul, always in quest of meaning, has a large appetite for these stories.
GoFundMe is an opportunity for people to get together and lend a helping hand.
Matt White was able to exploit his understanding of human psychology to attract donations for Chauncy. As we read:
In a world inundated with bad news, people want something that makes them feel hopeful. They also like to become part of an unfolding story that seems to promise a happy ending in the not so distant future. Matt’s depiction of Chauncy—the poor, hardworking teen with a thousand-watt smile—neatly fit these requirements.
Two. What kind of help does GoFundMe provide?
Mostly, GoFundMe is for medical procedures that people can’t afford on their own. As we read:
Almost immediately, however, it became apparent that “for life’s desperate moments” would have been an equally appropriate slogan. Although GoFundMe’s 18 preset donation categories today include education, animals, travel, and community, the most popular has always been medical. It currently accounts for one in three campaigns, according to company estimates.
Still, the variety on display in this marketplace of need is vast. People have used GoFundMe to eliminate elementary-school students’ lunch debt, to send the local soccer team to nationals, to replace stolen chickens, to help a stranger attend a bachelor party—and, more and more these days, to get involved with divisive political causes.
Three. How does Matt conceal certain facts and cherry-pick other facts to create an appealing narrative?
We read that he keeps things “upbeat” for popular consumption:
In the heady first weeks, when the money was pouring in, Matt learned more about Chauncy’s situation from Barbara—namely, how his birth mother had struggled with addiction, leading Barbara to take custody of Chauncy and six of his siblings. Matt glided quickly over that information on GoFundMe, however. He wanted to keep things upbeat.
Four. What was the dark side of the flood of sympathy that Chauncy and his family suffered?
We read that they became more like famous media objects rather than real human beings and as media objects they were subject to abuse. There was a threat of kidnapping so great they had to hide in a hotel.
GoFundMe exposes human psychology in the social media age: We are drawn to social media fame and personalities more than we are real people and as such we are drawn to over simplistic and often false narratives that define people. In other words, we are suckers for mythology.
Another question rises from social media fame: Is giving money to someone “who’s trending” a sign of human depth or human superficiality?
Another dark element is that simple narratives often conceal what is called the “White Savior Industrial Complex.” As we read:
Gofundme campaigns that go viral tend to follow a template similar to Chauncy’s Chance: A relatively well-off person stumbles upon a downtrodden but deserving “other” and shares his or her story; good-hearted strangers are moved to donate a few dollars, and thus, in the relentlessly optimistic language of GoFundMe, “transform a life.” The call-and-response between the have-nots and the haves poignantly testifies to the holes in our safety net—and to the ways people have jerry-rigged community to fill them. In an era when membership in churches, labor unions, and other civic organizations has flatlined, GoFundMe offers a way to help and be helped by your figurative neighbor.
What doesn’t fit neatly into GoFundMe’s salvation narratives are the limits of private efforts like Matt White’s. GoFundMe campaigns blend the well-intentioned with the cringeworthy, and not infrequently bring to mind the “White Savior Industrial Complex”—the writer Teju Cole’s phrase for the way sentimental stories of uplift can hide underlying structural problems. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice,” Cole wrote in 2012. “It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”
We have yet another disappointing element in the Matt White Saves Chauncy Black Story: Chauncy’s life isn’t following a redemption narrative. As we read:
Matt’s relationship with the Blacks grew strained over time. He worried that Chauncy was getting too puffed up from all the attention, and he was disappointed that he hadn’t transformed the teenager’s life as much as he’d hoped to. Chauncy dropped out of high school midway through his junior year, blaming an injury that damaged his eyesight. By then, Matt knew that the straight A’s he had touted in his first Facebook post were something of a mirage. The school principal pressed teachers to inflate grades, Chauncy told me, and Barbara said her grandson was too busy hustling to put food on the table to be more than a middling student. Not long after his 18th birthday, Chauncy had news for Matt: His girlfriend was pregnant. He was thrilled, but Matt didn’t share his excitement. “I tried to influence their lives, but that culture, it’s just something else,” he told me. “It’s hard to come up against that influence—not finishing school, having children out of wedlock.”
Meanwhile, Matt said, it seemed as though the Blacks called him every time they needed help with any little thing—when the toilet broke, when someone needed a ride to work. “It was fun, but it got to be too much,” Matt said. So last December, he decided he had to establish better boundaries. He deactivated the Chauncy’s Chance Facebook page and threw himself into a new career as a cancer coach. (Matt has developed methods involving “diet, holistic healing … lifestyle support, stress and inner healing coaching,” he said, to “support the body’s natural ability to heal itself of cancer.”)
Barbara was confused and hurt when Matt suddenly vanished, she told me. After doctors found blood clots in her legs, she says, she texted Matt to tell him she was in the hospital awaiting surgery. “He just didn’t reply,” she said. Matt told me he never received the texts, and that he’d taken Barbara to the hospital for this condition at least three times before the surgery.
Five. What example do we find in the essay of someone who fails at generating income from GoFundMe?
When a surgery is “too gross” people get “turned off,” so what we find is that real need doesn’t necessarily get compassion if it isn’t palatable and has a pretty bow on the neat narrative. People don’t like “messy” stories.
We find that ongoing needs don’t attract charity. People prefer a “one-time fix.” As we read:
What’s wrong with you also influences whether you score big with medical crowdfunding, according to the University of Washington at Bothell medical anthropologist Nora Kenworthy and the media scholar Lauren Berliner, who have been studying the subject since 2013. Successful campaigns tend to focus on onetime fixes (a new prosthetic, say) rather than chronic, complicated diagnoses like Laila’s. Terminal cases and geriatric care are also tough to fundraise for, as are stigmatized conditions such as HIV and addiction- or obesity-related problems.
Six. What other unsavory forces can drive GoFundMe?
We learn that Alt-Right characters who want to demonize immigrants can start fundraising campaigns based on white ethno-nationalism, which is growing in our politically divided country. Some characters are trying to privately fund “The Wall” at the border.
Option D for Essay 3, Due April 27
Read Rachel Monroe’s essay “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly” and develop an argumentative claim that supports or refutes Monroe’s claim that the appeal of GoFundMe is based on an over simplistic narrative that conceals unsavory contradictions and complexities.
Sample Outline and Thesis Statements
Introduction, Paragraph 1: Explain how GoFundMe appeals to human psychology.
Thesis, Paragraph 2: Argue for or against the idea that GoFundMe has a dark side that makes it less inspirational and angelic than it appears without close examination.
Paragraphs 3-6, your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7, your counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 8, a powerful restatement of your thesis, your conclusion.
Works Cited page with 2 sources.
Sample Thesis Statements
Thesis That Criticizes GoFundMe
While there can be no doubt that GoFundMe has done some good in this world, a close scrutiny of this online phenomenon reveals a dark side consisting of false redemption narratives, marketing hype that favors one person’s struggle over another’s less appealing one, the confusion of real compassion for superficial attraction to “trending” media sensations, and the creation of the “White Savior Industrial Complex.”
Thesis That Defends GoFundMe
While I will concede that GoFundMe is far from a perfect charitable enterprise, rife with unsavory elements, overall it achieves a public good by rallying support for the economically challenged, by raising public awareness for much economic and social injustice, by getting communities to rally support for the needy in meaningful crusades, and by exploiting social media’s potential for noble fundraising.