He Can Speak Well...

While driving to school this morning, I was listening to a segment on NPR that really caught my attention. It was titled “The Questions People Get Asked about Their Race” and, basically, NPR asked participants on Twitter ‘What’s one of question you’ve been dying to ask another race but never do because of the impending ‘THAT’S RACIST’ aftermath?’

Here’s a link to the segment, I highly recommend taking a look at some of the other questions/comments people posted. They are a bit alarming, to say the least!

Anyways, one comment, tweeted by J. L. Reed, caught me way off guard…

This comment is just SHOCKING. First off, the use of the “exclamation point” implies how surprised this person was that a “black guy” could speak well. You wonder, why is he so surprised?! Well, he is clearly making a generalization that all African-Americans are incapable of speaking “well”, whatever that even means, and extremely ignorant considering that we do have an African-American president. This claim just continues to support how Americans have not progressed towards achieving racial equality.

But what is most frightening is the second part of the comment, “Do you have any white in your family?” This person automatically assumes that if a black person is able to speak well, than it must be because of the influence of a white person, basically implying that, he thinks, African-Americans are inferior to whites. AGAIN, highlighting the lack of progress America has made towards attaining racial equality.  

Numbers Lie

A recent statistic was posted on NPR that stated “a record of 40 percent of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary income for the family”. This number was then compared to the 11 percent of moms in 1960 who were the so called bread winners of the family. This post was noting the great progress we have made towards achieving gender equality considering that 40 to 11 percent is definitely a dramatic shift in numbers, however, have we REALLY progressed?

From further research, I found that, currently, women hold only 91 out of the 535 seats in Congress! This means 444 seats of Congress are held by men, this is just startling. And within the growing business world women are only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. However, the most noteworthy statistic of all is that only 18 PERCENT of leadership positions are held by women, the other 80 percent of American leaders are dominated by the male population (Center forAmerican Women and Politics). These numbers make a pretty clear argument that women are still not being viewed as equals, and history has not progressed as much as the numbers suggest.

Interestingly enough though, the lack of women leaders is not due to women being seen as incompetent but rather because they are not seen as both “nice and competent” according to a gender bending experiment conducted by Heidi Roizen, a successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. As part of the experiment, a professor at Columbia University took a case study Heidi had written and copied it word-for-word, altering only one detail, he changed Heidi’s name to Howard. The professor’s students read each case study and found Heidi and Howard to be equally competent. However, people tended to like Howard more than Heidi. Sheryl Sandburg, author of the novel Lean
In, explains this is because when a “…woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she’s considered more nice than competent”. As such, the dilemma is not that women are incapable of such a task, it is because people fail to accept that a woman can be both nice AND competent, two traits that are deemed necessary for an authoritative position!

Do you think Americans will ever be able to view women as both “nice and competent”? Are women judged, or looked down upon, for being more competent than nice, and if so why?

Have You Forgotten About Sweatshops?

Time and time again we hear these horrid stories about how our clothes are made. How these inexpensive shirts we constantly buy are being made by these poor workers who have to work for more than twelve hours a day, receive little to no pay, are constantly beaten, and overall just treated as less than human. In 2006 there was an article, discussing just that, the dismal working conditions of factories located in Jordanian.  "[Us, Jordanian workers,] used to start at 8 in the morning, and…work until midnight, 1 or 2 a.m., seven days a week," exclaimed Nargis Akhter, a worker at the Paramount Garment factory just outside Amman. Now you would think, seven years later, that time has progressed, and we, as Americans, have addressed this problem.

However, just this Sunday, an article posted in the New York Times, was illustrating the exact same issues as the above article did in 2006. What is surprising is how shocked everyone is about the news. Yes, the numbers are definitely shocking, thousands of garment workers are being killed each year due to these awful working conditions, but haven’t we heard this all before? And, as such, shouldn’t we do something about it!

The thing is, just as Layna Mosley, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shares “U.S. retailers probably think that this is in the news” for now, she said, but that “the dust will settle and it will go back to normal.” Mosley’s point seems very familiar in American society. For the first couple of days American consumers will be concerned about the types of clothes they purchase, but soon the news will “settle” and people will carry on as they were, and forget all about the horrid working conditions, well until the same story appears again a couple years later. 

This continuous cycle portrays that progress has not been made. People seem to just forget about what has happened in the past. Are there other stories within American history that share similar patterns to that of these on-going sweatshops? 

Cost of Tuition Crushes the American Dream

For the past couple of days we have discussed some indicators of social class, such as, the crime rate, population density, and income rate of different types of town. One indicator that we have continually noted is the level of education people within a town achieve because, to many, a higher education is seen as a sign of success within American society. Typically, those with a higher level of education receive a higher paying job, thus, being able to fall under the so called "upper-class".

However, achieving this higher education has become EXTRMELY expensive, around $40,000 in tuition for four years, and this cost continues to increase each year (Coast of Higher Education). As such, the middle class families continue to struggle to try and send their kids off to college. While, the wealthiest are automatically guaranteed a spot in attaining a well respected level of education, thus continuing to be placed in the upper class.

Therefore, the rich continue to stay in the upper class, while the people of the working class continue to struggle in trying to send their kids to college, while trying to maintain a standard form of living. As this repetitive cycle continues, the "American dream", the ability to move up the social ladder within American society, has become far from a reality. The gap between the rich and the poor will continue to grow, and mobility up the social ladder becomes almost impossible. With this in mind, why do Americans continue to believe in the "American dream"?

Be Like Daisy

This Friday I saw The Great Gatsby in the theaters. Personally, I was not a huge fan of the movie, probably because we just finished reading the book, and books tend to be better than the movie. However, something I found quite unsettling about the film was the way they portrayed the character Daisy. Within the book I thought it was clear that Daisy was in love with Gatsby, not for who he was, but rather his money. As such, putting Daisy in a bad light for being so materialistic. Yet, in the movie, I believe, Daisy was seen as an innocent character that does nothing wrong, and so everyone should always side with her.

For example, within the movie, the scene where Daisy expresses her love for Gatsby to Tom truly highlights this innocence of Daisy. During this climatic scene, Gatsby loses his temper for a moment, and so Daisy becomes frightened and crawls back to Tom. By doing so, the audience feels bad for Daisy, also making it seem like did nothing wrong. This differing perception of the character of Daisy in the movie makes it seem that Americans idealize her and want to be like her. Do you believe Americans praise the idea of the character of Daisy, the materialistic, upper-class personae?

Quite the Advantage

After discussing in class about the main factors that show a strong correlation with test scores, I came across this article that discussed a “so-called perfect” school called Avenue, located in New York. Within Avenue, as early as nursery school, kids are immersed into either the language of Mandarin or Spanish. By kindergarten, all kids are given an I-Pad, and eventually these students will get the opportunity to study for a semester in either Sao, Beijing, or any other of the twenty campuses the school has set up around the world.

As I was reading about this extraordinary curriculum, I was thinking of how this advanced education, costing one $43,000 in tuition, will obviously show a positive correlation with test scores. These students are automatically being given such a high advantage in the world. However, what about the rest of the children in America that cannot afford this elite education? Does the rest of the country have no other option but to just fall behind?

All of this concentration of effort and money, 70 billion dollars, is being put into this one school yet, it is only directed for such a negligible number of people. And according to the authors of “The Manufactured Crisis”, “the great majority of schooling standards have not improved over the past twenty-five years”. As such, why does our country choose to create this one perfect school for such a select number of people, instead of trying to spread the effort in trying to improve the overall schooling systems?                                  

Tip-toeing Around Evoltion

Recently, "educators unveiled new guidelines...that call for sweeping changes in the way science is taught in the Unites States" according to this article in the New York Times. Apparently these new guidelines take a firm stand on teaching evolution to students. My first thought was "yes, progress!..more students will be taught the threory of evolution". However, as I expected, the idea of teaching such contreverical subjects, like evolution and climate change, has already drawn hostile commentary. Additionally, while many states are expected to adopt the new guidelines within the next year or two, it will still take several years before schools translate them into thier curriculum. As such, schools will continue to postpone the teaching of evolution.

The thing that struck me the most, however, was how Judith Luber-Narod, a high school science teacher at Abby Kelly Foster Charter Public School, was hesitant about teaching a controversial subject so she thought, "how can you teach the environment without talking about it?". I found this very strange because I was skeptical to how a teacher was supposed to teach a topic, without ever actually talking about it directly...

Mrs. Luber-Narod came up with an experiment to try and stimulate global warming. She explained nothing about global warming itself, and only told her students to watch the experiment and come up with your own conclusion, as such not actually talking about the subject. While these students were exposed to the topic and forced to come up with their own opinion, do you think that is enough to substantially educate these students?