Friday, February 26, 2010

Talking Point #3

"Gayness, Multicultural Education, and Community" by Dennis Carlson is similar to articles our class has read. A lot of articles were about white privilege which is whites vs. non-whites. This article talks about heterosexuals vs. homosexuals which is similar to whites vs. non-whites except this argument can involve any race.

I like how Carlson began this article. Very shortly after he began, he stated he was using the term gay because it was politically correct and it did not segregate between homosexual men and women. Whereas if he used the terms lesbian and gay, he would clearly be distinguishing and he wants to unite all homosexuals. He believes this will make the gay community stronger.

I think it is interesting that Carlson brings gay bars into this article. At first I was like why is this in here? I now understand that when homosexuality was looked down upon severely, gay bars were the only place for people to turn to. The analogy the author uses helps to understand completely. He says it was like when blacks were segregated and only had their churches to turn to.

In schools a researcher named James Sears found out several things about how teachers conduct themselves about homosexuality. One teacher "went out of his way" to not teach poems by a writer because he was gay and his poems expressed sexual content. Another teacher said she was keeping her opinions to herself when the topic turned to AIDs and homosexuality. He found many teachers spoke badly of homosexuality and wanted to stamp it out of people.

I found all of this very intriguing but I could not figure out was his final point was except for the fact that everyone needs to listen, accept one another and homosexual must not be afraid and find their voice. I feel Carlson made a bigger point but I must have missed it. I believe no one should feel oppressed because of their race, gender, sexual preference or disability. To go with the theme of the article, sexual preference should not be looked down upon because scientists are starting to prove it is not a choice.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Aria

This article is very different from every other article we read in class. Every article is about education theory whereas this only has a little bit of theory in the end. Most of this is a personal story, told in the first person. I like how the writer, Rodriguez, begins this article with pure sarcasm. This really lightens the mood at first. After he describes what his school life was like, he really supports the sterotype for nuns in the fact that they can be pretty nasty. He then explained what happened when his worlds collided. That is, his school life and his home life. He painted a pretty clear picture as he described the nuns sitting on the blue couch and his parents speaking spanish in the kitchen but, upon his entering, would only speak english and forced him to speak it too. Of course he and his siblings mastered English eventually but Rodriguez gets nostalgic from time to time about how things were when he only spoke Spanish. He must realize there are many advantages to being billingual, especially from a young age. In the end of the article he explains bilingual children gain two forms of identity, a private one and a public one.

Friday, February 12, 2010

I messed up in incorporating the links into my text but have now fixed the problem.

Here is the Youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ONuBBmRRpM

and here is the article:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/whiteprivilege.htm

Talking Point #1

The idea that McIntosh presents in her article, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack", does not present anything new. We have discussed white privilege in class and this does not shed new light on the topic. However I found this article to be very interesting because its only focus and objective was on white privilege. McIntosh starts off her article by explaining how most men are oblivious to their advantage over women. This leads straight into her creating a list of some of her white privileges. My favorite point is number twelve. Number twelve talks about how a white person can swear or wear rather tacky clothing, without appearing as poor or as a representative of their race. This point directly relates to this Youtube video: http://http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ONuBBmRRpM. The video talks about teenage pregnancy , at first specifically about Sarah Palin's daughter, but then it turns to all races in general. I found this part to be more relevant although I would not skip over the part about Sarah Palin's daughter. That is also some insightful information as it pinpoints a specific case. As I stated this article did not introduce brand new information. Our class has already read and discussed a lot about this topic, even though we are only going into the fourth week of the semester. If one does a quick Google search , you can find for yourself that many white people are oblivious to the fact of white privilege. You can see these are not just some random numbers but actual facts. Take this article for a prime example of that: http://http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/whiteprivilege.htm. The beginning of this article is what I focused on but, once again, I would not oppose a full read through of this text. It is a very similar read to McIntosh's article.