isabelle's blog!

We watched the "13th" Documentary by Netflix (2016) in class on 9/24 and 9/26.  I felt discouraged, confused, sad, and stirred to action after watching this documentary. I also did feel helpless at times and inspired by the courage of those who advocate for true success. I thought that the message of the film was not ultimately hopeful, because it seemed to not have a call to action at the documentary's conclusion. I thought that the director of the documentary left it more "up in the air" for viewers to feel encouraged to see what they could do about striving for justice in terms of America's mass incarceration problem. I recognized that they were trying to go for a hopeful message at the end, but it just felt sad and discouraging to me.  I feel like I did not know much about the prison system before watching this film. I knew that America had a mass criminalization and imprisonment issue, but I didn't know the extent of it. To find out that the US has ...

 RACIAL IDEOLOGIES:  A common racial ideology is the idea that all immigrants, specifically those who are people of color, are bad and "destroy" America's culture, economics, and society. This is an extremely negative ideology, but it seems to be all over the media, especially with politics being such a large divide between every day Americans.  People believe in this ideology because it's easier to blame a group of people about some of the more difficult issues surrounding America today than to actually address it. People from the dominant group, maybe people who have been in America their whole lives or have had generations of family live in America, blame immigrants of color because they feel like the change in America's demographic is impacting their lives and they are unhappy about it. There are white people and people of color who hold this idea, with some even believing in it because they feel like they may be superior, whether it be morally or in some any ...

 This week we talked about stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, microaggressions, and family racial-ethnic socialization in class.  I chose to read the article about racial socialization in Asian American families by Jennifer Young at Stanford University.  1. Some of the messages that parents gave in the study were: "We didn't talk about it"  "Treat people equally."  Some parents warned their children that they would encounter racism Stereotypes would persist Some parents held views that contradicted their liberal views  2. My parents didn't really talk about race very often. It was not the subject of "lessons" that I was given. I would tend to agree that my parents have mentioned the first 4 points from above. My parents definitely encouraged me to treat people equally always, regardless of their race, but were also careful in mentioning that some people in our world would always hold prejudice, and not to be too affected by it. Stereotypes wer...

This past week, we discussed race, ethnicity, racial identity, and culture with a focus and emphasis on how it affected our personalities, lifestyles, and practices.  The list I made in class had the following personal identities on it. 1. Lutheran 2. Woman 3. Asian-American 4. Taiwanese I do not think any of my identities changed from before class to after class. I think that they stayed fairly consistent. I learned about how to define these identities in high school and also in some of my other HDFS classes, such as HDFS 201.   Being a Lutheran is a crucial part of my identity. The values and beliefs that the Lutheran church holds make me who I am. Following the command of "you shall love your neighbor as yourself" in the gospels is how I love and treat those around me. This identity is only a couple years old, but it has come to be what I consider the most important thing about me. I have explored these identities by sharing about it with others and by continuing to li...