For October 12: Blue Book In-Class Open-Book Essay Exam
Blue Book Exam:
Developing Hooks’ ideas in “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” (482) that the poor are painted with negative stereotypes in various stratums of society (media, college, TV, movies, popular culture, etc.) and Jonathan Kozol's "Still Separate, Still Unequal" (347), draw insights from both essays to analyze the myths and realities of being poor. What ways do you see common social class stereotypes perpetuated in your daily life be it college, friends, family, movies, or TV? What realities, as opposed to myths about the poor, do you see in Kozol's essay? Your essay should be 500 words and needs to address Hooks' and/or Kozol's text at least 3 times throughout the essay.
Consider the following:
Too often, perhaps, Americans make poor people synonymous with stupidity, disease, helplessness, moral bankruptcy, and victimhood.
And the converse is true: Too often Americans make rich people synonymous with intelligence, virtue, inventiveness, innovation, self-reliance, moral superiority, and Darwinian advantage.
Perhaps these stereotypes speak to our greatest fears and desires and these fears and desires are codified and reinforced in consumer and media images.
Your Blue Book Essay Requirements
To reach our 6,000 word total (4 typed essays of 1,250 words and two Blue Book essays of 500 words), your Blue Book essay should be a thesis followed by four 120-word paragraphs to insure 500 words.
You can rewrite from a draft in class.
You can refer to book and notes.
You can use smartphone as a dictionary.
You should quote, paraphrase, or summarize from Hooks' and/or Kozol's essays at least 3 times.
You don't need any sources other than Hooks' and Kozols' essay.
Your essay could be checked for plagiarism if you use material that is not your own.
You should write medium to large, never small "ant" writing.
You should use a dark pen or pencil, never a light one, to save my eyes.
You can cross out words here and there.
You should double-space (skip a line) so I can write comments.
While you don't need an introduction or a conclusion, you can write an intro or a closing if writing them makes you feel better or helps your writing.
If you're happy with this assignment, you may expand it for your second typed essay.
“Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” by Bell Hooks
Introduction to Social Class
Introduction: Defining Class
Adam Carolla defines hippies as people who are part angry, part depressed, and part lazy. They fail to achieve the American Dream, Carolla argues, because of their laziness and mediocrity, so they construct a worldview that justifies their state of not having things. They see a Mercedes driver, a person driving the hippy's unacknowledged dream car, and say the Mercedes driver is a bad, immoral person. The hippy, Carolla argues, is envious of those who have luxury products and constructs a world where bad people own those luxuries.
Listening to Carolla, I felt guilty for not buying a Breitling and a Mercedes, as if the absence of those objects in my life is evidence of my laziness and mediocrity. Of course, I'm engaging in over simplistic thinking. My discretionary income should be reserved for my twins' college and my not spending it on luxuries I don't need is not evidence that I'm a lazy hippy. However, Carolla's philosophy speaks to our perception of class division in America.
For Carolla, hippy is a code word for bum, malcontent, envious outcast, indolent miscreant, and sloth.
The implication is that the opposite is a virtue: someone with high earning power who buys his dream possessions evidences his intelligence and hard work. He is a producer while the hippy is a taker.
This binary universe is saddled with logical fallacies and compromised by complexities and nuances, but the point is real: Americans look at those who "made it" and those who didn't. It's the difference between heaven and hell on Earth.
Other Ways of Looking at Class: The Worship of Power
When we talk about class, we're not really talking about earning power as a sign of upward class mobility. Earning power is part of class, but is actually only a small part of it.
Another idea of class in America is the idea of mobility and ascent. When we climb the ladder, we use the term arriviste or upstart to describe someone who has gone from "rags to riches."
Part of the American Dream of upward class mobility is going to college and getting a bachelor's degree. Americans see college as a ticket to moving from a lower class to a higher class.
We find, though, that less than 14% community college students transfer to college and get a bachelor's. Therefore, this American Dream is not as "easy pickings" as we'd often like to believe. The American Dream is hardly the low hanging fruit that's free for the taking like it was post World War II through the late 1970s for privileged white people.
Getting to the Heart of Social Class: Perception and Identity
Aside from going up the economic ladder and defining class in sheer numbers, social class is more about identity and the way others perceive us in terms of our rank or status.
So what we are really talking about is a particular type of American class status, the ranking system that exists uniquely in America. How people perceive us in the American ranking system, and how we perceive ourselves, defines our class.
We are dependent on validation and often addicted to flattery, so we rely on status cues or status symbols to receive the validation and flattery we crave.
Being able to afford first-class airline tickets is not just about luxury; it's about asserting one's privilege over the "common folk" sardined together in coach.
Material possessions, too, often point to this flattery. For example, a "Platinum" or "Limited" edition car makes us feel special, better, and privileged. And we want others to see this special designation on our car's nameplate.
Social Class and the Shame Factor
Mythology feeds a lot of our ideas about social class. For example, the rich, according to mythology, are rich because of their alleged superior character. They got rich because they were disciplined, hard-working, and willing to sacrifice.
Poor people are poor, the mythology goes, because of bad character such as laziness and bad choices.
In other words, we attribute virtue to the rich and exact shame on those who lack earning power. For example, some schools give "shame sandwiches" to students who are behind in their payments.
To be judged as poor is equivalent to being consigned to the hell of ostracism, shame, and stigmatization. Poverty is not just a monetary state but a psychological state as well.
To be judged poor in America is to suffer the worst mockery in line with Honey Boo Boo and Mamma June.
Myth of of Class Equality, Class Privilege, Whiteness, and the Uppity Factor
During times of slavery and Jim Crow, the United States was racially segregated. Therefore, for many years the idea of social class was based on "whiteness" or white privilege. Aspiring to "be white," that is molding oneself on stereotypes of "desirable white behaviors," for many decades was a sign of class. This thing we call whiteness has a certain pretentiousness, hauteur, grandiosity, superciliousness, privilege and entitlement in creating this aura of being "uppity" and "bourgie," a truncated version of the word bourgeoisie and pronounced boo-zhee.
A hipster is the same pretentious person who puts on the same act of grandiosity, but does so with more irony, false self-deprecation, and higher fashion.
To be uppity and pretentious in America traditionally was to study the body language and linguistic codes of white privilege.
To be uppity, a person of white privilege did not only disdain people of different ethnicities and races. The white uppity snob also scorned uneducated white people, who were deemed "peasants" or docile sheep or "trailer trash."
America's history began with the notion of lower class white peasants being undesirable and a sign of what not to be. We have scorned "white trash" since American settlers came to America from Europe.
We read in Nancy Isenberg's White Trash that 400 years ago, Europe sent its "trash" to America to do menial work. Ugly caricatures of white trash were widespread in media, cartoons, educational tracts. These caricatures were propagated by politicians, theologians, philosophers, and those who peddled ideas to the masses.
America has always had an appetite for exploiting workers from foreign lands as we see in this essay.
Class Consciousness Continues to Flourish
Today Americans of all races are obsessed with the codes that make up social class, the hierarchy or ranking system by which we judge our fellow Americans. Knowingly or not, we use a set of codes to ascribe class rank on others and ourselves.
The 6 Class Codes
The six major class codes that rank us in America's hierarchy system are the following:
One. Your zip code:
According to Paul Fussell, the higher the concentration of bowling alleys in a zip code, the lower the class ranking. Another sign of low social ranking is a zip code in which daycare centers are ten feet away from "gentleman's clubs."
A KFC making millions of revenue in a poor zip code is looked upon as a crack house and banned from a rich zip code.
A combination Pizza Hut-Taco Bell is relegated to poor zip codes as parodied in this song.
Two. Your education rank:
Your education is evidenced by not only your diploma but your body language, speech cadence and inflection, vocabulary, your sphere of travel, and your grasp of irony.
Education is also evidenced by speaking many languages, being well traveled, and showing exceptional talent in the arts such as music, painting, and writing.
These characteristics make up one's educational status.
Three. Your professional designation:
Terms such as blue-collar ascribe working or lower class. White-collar ascribes upper or middle class. One of the highest classes is the creative class, a term popularized by writer Richard Florida. Creating software and computer apps or being a professor at a prestigious university are examples of the creative class. Working in the arts, media, and design are other examples.
Four. Your tastes in art, music, entertainment, fashion, transportation, and leisure:
Class is more than earning power. It is revealed in our tastes. Are our tastes cultivated, current, and educated, and nuanced? Or are they tacky? Tacky is a word associated with low class. Other similar words to describe low class taste are crass, gauche, gaudy, uncouth, unctuous, vulgar, tawdry, and if you want to show off your education, you can use the Russian word poshlost, which means vulgar banality or something that is produced with huge effort to show off but is grotesque and without imagination or humanity. Some people have used the word poshlost to describe vulgar people who define themselves only by their material possessions. Such people are also called philistines.
Bad taste is "bling that tries too hard" like putting 20 inch chrome wheels on a 1999 Nissan Altima or decorating one's front lawn with gnomes, lambs, lions, flamingos, butlers, Buddhas, gargoyles, etc.
In Orange County, a "housewife" has a gold-trimmed round crib with a chandelier over it.
A sequin-encrusted toilet means you're trying too hard.
A man's diamond gold wristwatch is a sad display of trying too hard.
Any notion of "luxury" from the bowels of Las Vegas is a tasteless abomination.
Five. Your use of language:
Your vocabulary, cadence, inflection, intonation, lilt, and accent (not necessarily dependent on going to college; you could be autodidactic) are all part of linguistic code you use that determines your social class. Casually using words like interstitial, hauteur, verisimilitude, sycophantic, and synecdoche evidences someone of an educated and therefore higher class. The trick to using the aforementioned words is never sounding like you're trying to use them. Rather, they are part of your natural, casual conversation.
Forcing the word verisimilitude into conversation is the equivalent of sitting on a sequin-encrusted toilet.
Six. Your grasp of irony:
Irony is the wry, sly, and sometimes sarcastic orientation of the educated cosmopolitan, the person who is a connoisseur of life's absurdities, contradictions, and ironic reversals. As a connoisseur of irony, the high-class cosmopolitan is not shocked by life's absurdities, but greets them with an expected sly grin.
Connoisseurs of irony are also experts at subtle self-deprecation, which gives the implicit message that they are too intelligent to take vanity and self-aggrandizement seriously even though their constant self-deprecation can often be an earnest attempt at being morally superior to those who don't efface themselves with equal rigor.
Conclusion
Where you live, what degree of education you have, what kind of job you have, how you dress, and entertain yourself, and how you speak all are part of the class code by which our fellow Americans judge and rank us according to the hierarchy system.
Let us be clear: Your class can even determine your happiness and life expectancy, as we read in "All Hollowed Out," an article that would make a good resource.
Also consult "America's self-destructive whites."
And consult "Why Are White Death Rates Rising?"
One. What is Hooks’ complaint about intellectuals when it comes to discussions of the poor?
Hooks contends that intellectuals sugar coat their language using terms like “underclass” or “economically disenfranchised,” terms, she believes, obscure the situation of poverty. Straight language, not pretentious academic euphemisms, is better. Call them what they are: poor.
Terms like "underclass" are dehumanizing and make the poor appear as an unfortunate species, a victim, and these implications further suggest intractable states, recurring cycles, and hopelessness.
Such a conclusion is convenient for the Haves because the Haves can stop helping the poor by saying to themselves, "It's an insolvable problem."
Perhaps academic language makes the problem of poverty more abstract and tends to minimize human suffering.
Calling the poor part of the "underclass" is a loaded word that suggests the writer's sociological agenda. He wishes to ascribe some deeper meaning to being poor that does not exist.
In Hooks’ experience, she was poor even though her father was “working class.” Her parents did not have all the social pathologies ascribed to the poor by "experts," even well-intentioned ones.
Additionally, Hooks saw the world as consisting of the “haves and the have-nots.”
Breaking down class further, there are four groups:
One. The poor, who are destitute
Two. The poor, who can barely make ends meet
Three. Those that work and have extra money or gravy
Four. The rich, those who don’t have to even work. They’re just rich.
Two. How is Hooks torn by her class status?
On one hand, Hooks is a successful academic, a member of the “professional-managerial class.” On the other hand, she doesn’t wallow in her elevated status because she still lives from a standpoint of money. She observes, “I mainly think about the world in terms of who has money to spend and who does not. Like many technically middle-class folks who are connected in economic responsibility to kinship structures where they provide varying material support for others, the issue is always one of money.
Because Hooks’ identity is rooted in being poor and because she knows who the poor are, as opposed to media’s false representations of the poor, Hooks does not have a negative view of poor people. She writes, “Poverty was no disgrace in our household. We were socialized early on, by grandparents and parents, to assume that nobody’s value could be measured by moral standards.”
In fact, in Hooks' religious household being poor made it easier to get to heaven. It was the rich who were in grave danger of going to hell.
Hooks' parents provided her with a Moral Ark, and when Hooks went to college she met cynics, moral relativists, and existential nihilists, many of whom became privileged but had no moral center.
This is a huge contrast, the toxic American myth of Success, which says rich people are rich because they are virtuous, morally good, hard working, disciplined, etc.
In contrast, America’s toxic Success Myth demonizes the poor: They Myth accuses the poor of deserving their poverty, of being lazy, of lacking character, etc.
In Hook’s world, “Value was connected to integrity,” not money.
Three. How did college represent the poor?
Hooks writes that they, the privileged students and professors, “almost always portrayed the poor as shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest, and unworthy.”
During Hooks’ studies, she was shocked and offended that the poor were represented as having no values.
Adding to this heinous myth against poor people, Hooks learned through her encounters that “successful” and “educated” people could be average in intelligence or plain stupid or ignorant, or all of the above.
Another misrepresentation of the poor is in popular culture. The poor are looked at as being beholden by abject greed and materialism.
Hooks observes that the result of these heinous stereotypes is that many poor, especially from the young generation, suffer a shame, a stigma, and a low self-esteem, which is “crippling.”
For Hooks, the solution to this class warfare is to be a political activist who helps redistribute the wealth more fairly and to help build literacy with the poor because literacy empowers people to fend off the stigmas generated by America’s heinous myths against poor people.
“Still Separate, Still Unequal” by Jonathan Kozol
One. What is America’s Myth of Equality, and how does Kozol dismantle this myth?
America prides itself on the following narrative: Rich or poor, you are in America, the land of the American Dream, where all people, rich or poor, can get a good education, climb up the social and economic ladder and live the Dream that makes America the greatest country in the world.
But in fact this narrative is a myth. From the very beginnings, a poor class was created to serve the rich. This class division was justified by painting the poor as inferior beings, incurably stupid, and "designed" for nothing but hard work. Consult Nancy Isenberg's White Trash. These mythologies were designed to justify white servitude and the slave trade from Africa.
Class inequality is the very foundation of America. No better can wee see this inequality than in public schools. Kozol finds American schools polarized by racial demographics and economic status so that the rich are given the resources to continue being rich and the poor are denied resources so they can continue to be poor.
Poor cities are racially segregated and have nothing: book, clean supplies, infrastructure, teachers who stay on the job for a significant tenure, and the latest technology. There is no music, art, computer tech, recreation, and outdoor exercise. School is a prison, a daycare center, and a place to sort out students into their “proper place.”
The schools are overcrowded and violent. Students go to school to survive, not flourish in education.
Poor students are trained to be “burger flippers” and work in the lowest tiers of the economic ladder. Teachers and principals work together to keep students from becoming incarcerated by giving them vocational training to work in retail and managerial positions.
The net effect of all this is the reinforcement of the gap between the haves and have-nots.
Perhaps what is most depressing is that Kozol, a best-selling author, is a voice for the poor, but his voice notwithstanding, there is no critical mass to help the poor, there is no political will to help the poor, there is no significant movement in this country to help the poor. As we read in Bell Hooks' essay, no one is interested in the poor.
It’s difficult to get traction when it comes to championing the needs of the poor. Mainstream America doesn’t get serious about changing anything until the crisis hits their home. That’s human nature: People talk a good talk, but don’t get serious until the crisis blows up in their face.
In fact, it’s in everyone’s interest to help minimize the underclass. Poverty breeds crime, and the last thing the haves want to do is seclude themselves like prisoners in their gated communities because they’re afraid of “what the have-nots are doing out there.”
The trash, filth, and lack of adequate resources at the inner city school, Kozol observes, would be unacceptable in a middle class white school. A principal of a poor school where a garbage bag is holding debris from a collapsing building is in despair. The principal says, “This . . . would not happen to white children.”
There are toxins, mold, lead, and carcinogenic pollutants at the poor schools while these hazards would not be allowed to be present at middle-class schools. In fact, such a presence would be cause for scandal and lawsuits, but not so in poor schools. Subjecting the poor to health hazards with impunity is “business as usual.”
There is no pre-school available in many poor areas. Such is not the case in middle-class communities.
This is the crux of the matter. The threshold of what’s acceptable for the poor and often people of color in this country is far different than what is acceptable for middle-class white students.
The poor cities up to half the men are in the prison system. This would be unacceptable in a white neighborhood.
There are no doctors to attend the health needs of the poor schools. This would be unacceptable in middle-class white schools.
The crime rate in poor neighborhoods would be unacceptable in middle-class white neighborhoods.
There are “food deserts,” places absent of real food, in poor communities while middle-class communities have an abundance of healthy food choices.
The government preys on the poor by putting them into a debtor’s prison. Such a prison doesn’t happen to the middle-class. We see this in the form of municipal violations, which are well chronicled in a John Oliver presentation.
Over and over again, we see a pattern: The threshold for what’s acceptable is different in poor and middle-class environments.
The broader implication of Kozol’s essay is that we are an immoral country. We value people based on their abundance, or absence, of money instead of valuing human life on principles of justice and fairness. We are a morally bankrupt country, yet we are in love with our Sweet-Smelling Myth of Equality and the American Dream. Our only dream is Greed and “I’ve Got Mine, Get Yours.”
If you really want to get depressed, you can face the fact that the problem is more systemic than schools. The problem is about the way we abuse, neglect, and exploit the have-nots while affording more rights to the haves.
Kozol points the finger at our hypocrisy. He writes, “There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that hold an eight-year-old inner-city child ‘accountable’ for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.
As it turns out, these standardized tests make billions for the companies that make them, are corrupt with graders chosen from Craig’s List ad (see John Oliver video), have failed to improve math and writing skills; however, the makers of these standardized tests have never been held accountable as their companies make billions of dollars.
Kozol's essay complements in Bell Hooks' essay in that he is giving the real causes of poverty while Hooks is giving the false causes. Together they are debunking myths about the poor.
Americans love reading horrific stories about pathological poor people because then the Haves can say "the poor do this to themselves." But there are just as many pathological stories of the rich. American celebrities date Russian oligarchs and go on binges. There are videos of Enron executives squandering money while ruining their employees' 401Ks.
For October 12: Blue Book In-Class Open-Book Essay Exam
Blue Book Exam:
Developing Hooks’ ideas in “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” (482) that the poor are painted with negative stereotypes in various stratums of society (media, college, TV, movies, popular culture, etc.) and Jonathan Kozol's "Still Separate, Still Unequal" (347), draw insights from both essays to analyze the myths and realities of being poor. What ways do you see common social class stereotypes perpetuated in your daily life be it college, friends, family, movies, or TV? . Your essay should be 500 words and needs to address Hooks' and/or Kozol's text at least 3 times throughout the essay.
Consider the following:
Too often, perhaps, Americans make poor people synonymous with stupidity, disease, helplessness, moral bankruptcy, and victimhood.
And the converse is true: Too often Americans make rich people synonymous with intelligence, virtue, inventiveness, innovation, self-reliance, moral superiority, and Darwinian advantage.
Perhaps these stereotypes speak to our greatest fears and desires and these fears and desires are codified and reinforced in consumer and media images.
Your Blue Book Essay Requirements
To reach our 6,000 word total (4 typed essays of 1,250 words and two Blue Book essays of 500 words), your Blue Book essay should be a thesis followed by four 120-word paragraphs to insure 500 words.
You can rewrite from a draft in class.
You can refer to book and notes.
You can use smartphone as a dictionary.
You should quote, paraphrase, or summarize from Hooks' and/or Kozol's essays at least 3 times.
You don't need any sources other than Hooks' and Kozols' essay.
Your essay could be checked for plagiarism if you use material that is not your own.
You should write medium to large, never small "ant" writing.
You should use a dark pen or pencil, never a light one, to save my eyes.
You can cross out words here and there.
You should double-space (skip a line) so I can write comments.
While you don't need an introduction or a conclusion, you can write an intro or a closing if writing them makes you feel better or helps your writing.
Writing Assignment Option
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that Kozol’s essay about poor schools is just the tip of the iceberg about a great scandal in which America neglects, abuses, and exploits the poor while patting itself on the back for being the land of the free. Be sure to have a counterargument section in your 1,000-word essay and a Works Cited page with 3 sources minimum.
Writer Who Supports Kozol’s Thesis
Contrary to the America’s dream of upward mobility, our country stacks the deck for the rich and against the poor as evidenced persuasively in Kozol’s essay. We see this moral bankruptcy in terms of disparities of what’s deemed acceptable in one economic stratum and what’s deemed acceptable in another. These disparities point to a deep moral bankruptcy that reveals America’s dream of equality to be a bald-faced lie.
Writer Who Complicates Kozol’s Thesis
Of course, we live in a two-tiered society with the haves and have-nots. We don’t need Kozol’s cry-baby-sodden research to tell us this. The pleasures we, the privileged, enjoy are predicated on servile class that attends our needs. This is not unique to America but universal. We need janitors, manual workers, and the like. We ferret out the strongest and brightest from the working class and give them some reward. But the weak, as they always have, are fated to serve the strong. This universal Darwinism is inevitable. Therefore, we are not compelled to condemn America’s alleged “moral bankruptcy.”
Option 10
Defend, refute, or complicate Hooks' assertion that the poor, contrary to the perception of "progressive intellectuals from privileged classes," can lead "a rich and meaningful life." Does Hooks provide enough context in her essay to defend such a position? Why are we as Americans horrified by poverty, not just from an economic, but a psychological sense? How do Hooks' views of the poor differ from most Americans'?
Writer Who Supports Bell Hooks’ Thesis
Hooks persuasively argues that the poor are not looked at as human being capable of having a rich inner life and strong moral values but as a diseased lot of victims who exist beneath the level of human beings evidenced by the way both the Left and the Right paint the poor as “unfortunate casualties” of an unjust political system, morally bankrupt ne’er-do-wells who’ve dug their own grave, or intellectually challenged sloths incapable of adapting to a Darwinian universe.
Writer Who Complicates Bell Hooks’ Thesis
While I admire Bell Hooks’ largely persuasive defense of the poor, I cannot drink Hooks’ Kool-Aid because my own lust for money gives me an aversion to poverty, I cannot imagine identifying economic impoverishment with the rich inner life Bell Hooks describes because all I see is depression and misery when I think of being poor, and my Darwinian instincts repel me from the vulnerabilities and self-harm I associate with poverty.
Essay Two, drawn from the book From Inquiry to Academic Writing, Is Due October 17: Choose One:
Writing Assignment Option 1
In the context of the Media Studies essays in Chapter 13, support, refute, or complicate Turkle’s argument that technology is degrading our humanity in many ways, not the least of which is our “tethered self.” Be sure your 1,250-word essay has a counterargument section and three sources in your Works Cited page.
My 1A students wrote on this topic, and they may quote from their papers, but they cannot re-submit their 1A papers because turnitin will correctly find them committing plagiarism. Because this topic is so urgent, we must confront it again if we wrote this in 1A and 1C, and I won't deny this topic to my 1C students who did not take my 1A class.
You have to remember the history of world religions is this:
One. Paganism
Two. Monotheism
Three. Consumerism (after the Industrial Revolution and advent of mass media)
Four. Social Media It's All About Me-Ism (only 10 years old. This is new stuff we're still processing. We're living the beginning of a new period of history.
Writing Assignment Option 2
In the context of Sherry Turkle's essay "Growing Up Tethered" (428) and CNN's video "Being Thirteen: The Secret World of Teens," develop a cause and effect thesis that addresses the special vulnerabilities 13-year-olds face as they navigate through the morass of social media.
Writing Assignment Option 3
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that Kozol’s essay about poor schools is just the tip of the iceberg about a great scandal in which America neglects, abuses, and exploits the poor while patting itself on the back for being the land of the free. Be sure to have a counterargument section in your 1,250-word essay and a Works Cited page with 3 sources minimum.
Writing Assignment Option 4
In the context of Beverly Daniel Tatum’s essay (374), develop a thesis that analyzes the causes and effects of “oppositional identity” as the driving force behind the “psychology of being black.”
Writing Assignment Option 5
Apply Beverly Daniel Tatum’s theory of “oppositional identity” to the racial divide evidenced during the O.J. Simpson Trial.
Writing Assignment Option 6 (adapted from book):
In a 1,250-word essay, develop an analytical thesis that compares the denigration of education that you see in Edmundson’s essay (389) and Kozol’s (347). Draw examples from your own education as you develop your thesis.
Writing Assignment Option 7
Developing Hooks’ idea in “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” (482) that the poor are painted with negative stereotypes in various stratums of society (media, college, TV, movies, popular culture, etc.), draw insights from Hooks’ essay to analyze the way you see common social class stereotypes perpetuated in your daily life be it college, friends, family, movies, or TV. You may want to use a personal interview. Your essay should be 1,250 words and have 3 sources for your Works Cited page.
Writing Assignment Option 8
Defend, refute, or complicate Hooks' assertion that the poor, contrary to the perception of "progressive intellectuals from privileged classes," can lead "a rich and meaningful life." Does Hooks provide enough context in her essay to defend such a position? Why are we as Americans horrified by poverty, not just from an economic, but a psychological sense? How do Hooks' views of the poor differ from most Americans'?
Writing Assignment Option 9
Defend, refute, or complicate Hooks' defense of the poor. Is poverty a virtue? Does poverty encourage integrity? Does poverty encourage moral values? Why? Why not? Explain.
Writing Assignment Option 10
In a 1,250-word essay, show how Kozol’s essay, “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” complements Ravitch’s argument that we need a macro view of the educational disparity crisis. Be sure to have a counterargument section and a Works Cited page with 3 sources minimum.
One. Why do people gravitate toward people like themselves?
We’re hard-wired to be tribalistic and seek people who remind us of ourselves. Part of this is survival, wanting to belong and find cooperation within the group.
Part of the tendency is energy saving: It requires less energy to acclimate to people who share our values, likes and struggles.
In adolescence, the desire to seek “members of our tribe” intensifies as adolescents seek an identity.
Tatum quotes James Marcia’s four identity “statuses” to explain the adolescent’s quest:
Diffuse: a state of little identity exploration and commitment
Foreclosed: a state of living with the beliefs from one’s parents
Moratorium: a state of active identity exploration with no commitment
Achieved: a state of strong personal commitment to a particular identity
Tatum argues that people of color, traditionally placed in the oppressed role, are hungrier for identity than white students, so they are going to be more likely to stick together.
Black students see themselves as “black” more intensely than whites see themselves as “white” because in part society sees black people as “black.”
Tatum makes an interesting point about her 10-year-old black son David who doesn’t see himself as “black” yet, because he’s not yet the age where society says he’s “black” in terms of certain negative stereotypes, but when he’s a teenager and he has to be cautious around the police, he’ll know he’s “black.”
Two. What is “the psychology of becoming Black”?
In the first stage, “the Black child absorbs many of the beliefs and values of the dominant White culture, including the idea that it is better to be White. The stereotypes, omissions, and distortions that reinforce notions of White superiority are breathed in by Black children as well as White.” In this first stage, called pre-encounter, “the personal and social significance of one’s racial group membership has not yet been realized, and racial identity is not yet under examination.
In the second stage, encounter, the child encounters racism and stereotypes, which forces him to be aware of “being black.” This stage occurs in late adolescence and early adulthood.
This shared struggle against racism and stereotypes becomes a glue that makes black youth stick together. Human nature dictates that we gravitate toward those who share our struggle.
Some teachers, as advanced as college, let their students know they’re “Black” by overt and covert racism. There is the infamous case of Malcolm X, a straight-A student, who was told by his junior high school teacher, that he would never amount to anything. There are teachers today, I’ve been told, who don’t call on an African-American student when he raises his hand for an entire semester. That student is saying to himself, “The teacher is calling on the white students, but he’s not calling on me, not today, not ever. I’m black, all right.”
Three. Why does a black child gravitate more to other black children than white children?
The author Tatum gives an example of a black child being treated as a stereotype by a white teacher and then the black child tells her white friend. The white friend says, “Mr. So and So is a really nice guy. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.” Even if the white friend is telling the truth, her tendency to dismiss the black friend’s concerns, makes her less appealing to another black friend who will feel the full weight of disrespect that her black friend feels.
People naturally seek empathy and other people who “get it.”
Four. What is oppositional identity?
We read that for many black adolescents, a time they are aware of “being black” in a white society, they feel repelled by “white” things and attracted to “black” things. As Tatum writes, “Certain styles of speech, dress, and music, for example, may be embraced as ‘authentically Black” and becomes highly valued, while attitudes and behaviors associated with Whites are viewed with disdain. The peer group’s evaluation of what is Black and what is not can have a powerful impact on adolescent behavior.”
According to Tatum, then, oppositional identity is a coping mechanism to the stress of being racially stereotyped and denigrated in a white-dominated society.
Tatum wants to make it clear that black students sitting together in the cafeteria are not plotting mayhem or showing hostility toward others; they are simply dealing with the stress in their lives through this bonding, which is a coping mechanism to the stress Tatum describes.
Tatum adds that this oppositional identity can be self-limiting to black adolescent students because this identity, ironically enough, can be based on black stereotypes. See page 381, paragraph 29.
She adds that academic achievement, regrettably, is not of the black stereotypes embraced as part of black oppositional identity. She writes, “Being smart becomes the opposite of being cool.” Some black kids who achieve well academically are accused by other black students “as not being black.”
We further read that to be labelled as a "brainiac" will result in ostracism or rejection from one's peers.
Five. What's the best strategy for black students who are academically advanced?
Tatum says they should not reject their blackness but become an "emissary," someone who champions the racial group through achievements.
Six. What painful irony does Tatum bring up regarding education in a post-civil rights America?
During segregation, blackness was championed by furthering one's education; in our post-segregated society education is looked at as a betrayal of blackness for too many black adolescents.
Tatum emphasizes that blacks should know their history because such knowledge will show them that there is a great intellectual legacy in black America including Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Frederick Douglass. We can today look to Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, Jamelle Boui, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, to name a few.
Writing Assignment Option 4
In the context of Beverly Daniel Tatum’s essay (374), develop a thesis that analyzes the causes and effects of “oppositional identity” as the driving force behind the “psychology of being black.”
Writing Assignment Option 5
Apply Beverly Daniel Tatum’s theory of “oppositional identity” to the racial divide evidenced during the O.J. Simpson Trial.
Find Fragments and Comma Splices
The other night I consumed a tub of Greek yogurt with peanut butter and honey so I'd have enough energy to watch a documentary about world hunger.
I wasn't really hungry, I was anxious. Whenever I get anxious; which is all the time, I eat like a demon.
Anxiety propels me to stuff my face even when I’m not hungry. The mechanical act of eating. Using my greedy hands to lift food to my mouth and then hearing my mandibles and molars crunch the food matter into mush, has a soothing effect on my anxieties—like giving a teething biscuit to a baby.
Anxiety compels me to engage in the practice of “preemptive eating.” The idea that I even though I’m not hungry in this moment, I might be “on the road” inside my car far away from nutritional resources so I had better fill up while I can. In truth, I’m not “on the road” that often evidenced by the fact that my nine-year-old car has only 33 thousand miles on the odometer. Clearly, then, my impulse for preemptive eating is indefensible.
But you see, my anxieties exaggerate the circumstances, so that I have ample food reserves in my car—cases of high-protein chocolate peanut butter bars and a case of bottled water. All that unnecessary weight in the trunk compromises my gas mileage, but my anxieties are a cruel tyrant.
Anxiety is the reason that, in spite of my hardcore kettlebell workouts, I am a good twenty pounds overweight. Being twenty pounds overweight makes me anxious, and these anxieties in turn make me want to eat more.
Contemplating this vicious cycle is making me extremely anxious.
Good food makes me anxious.
Just thinking about good food can make me so anxious I’ll obsess over it in bed, so I’ll toss and turn all night. Like a heroin addict.
When I was in my early twenties, I ate donuts that were so good I wanted to drop out of college, give up on relationships, and hole myself up in my mother’s basement. Where I’d spend the rest of my life eating donuts.
I suffer from food insomnia. Meaning that fixating at night on a certain delicious meal I once had can prevent me from falling asleep.
There’s one food in particular that keeps me up at night—chocolate brownies.
Chocolate brownies are the best delivery system for sending an explosion of chocolate into the brain’s pleasure centers. Chocolate brownies saturate my brain with so much dopamine that after eating a brownie platter it’s not safe for me to drive or to operate heavy mechanical equipment. When I was a kid, I took cough medicine laced with codeine, and there was a warning label on the back: “Not safe to drive or to operate heavy mechanical equipment.” Chocolate brownie mix should have the same warning on the back of the box.
The best brownies mix I’ve ever had are Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Chip Brownies from Costco. I’ve purchased the same brand from other stores, but the Costco version is the best. Costco apparently uses its special powers to have Ghirardelli make an exclusive proprietary formula that is far superior to other versions, this fact has been corroborated by conversations I’ve had with Orange County housewives.
I don’t live in Orange County, and I don’t normally have conversations with housewives. That I talked with them about the superior quality of the exclusive Costco version of Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Chip Brownies mix attests to the severity of my unhealthy dependence on food.
Costco does a good job of making you think about food. Before you even walk inside Costco, you smell the freshly baked cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, and cream Danish. The smell makes you run inside the store.
Chronologically speaking, I am supposed to be an adult, but like a kid I’m running toward the Costco entrance while pushing an empty shopping cart. I must be a scary sight. This 240-pound middle-aged bald guy aggressively pushing his battering ram into a giant food larder. Where he will pillage the spoils. I’m like an Old Testament warlord about to ransack a defeated city.
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