media post #10

1. Siasoco, Ricco and Schmuel Ross. “Japanese Relocation Centers.” www.infoplease.com. 2007. 12 Nov. 2007 .
Japanese Relocation Centers
During World War II, nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans were under lock and key
by Ricco Villanueva Siasoco and Shmuel Ross
On February 19, 1942, soon after the beginning of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The evacuation order commenced the round-up of 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage to one of 10 internment camps—officially called "relocation centers"—in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.
Why Were the Camps Established?
Roosevelt's executive order was fueled by anti-Japanese sentiment among farmers who competed against Japanese labor, politicians who sided with anti-Japanese constituencies, and the general public, whose frenzy was heightened by the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. More than 2/3 of the Japanese who were interned in the spring of 1942 were citizens of the United States.
Similar Orders in Canada
In Canada, similar evacuation orders were established. Nearly 23,000 Nikkei, or Canadians of Japanese descent, were sent to camps in British Columbia. It was the greatest mass movement in the history of Canada.
Though families were generally kept together in the United States, Canada sent male evacuees to work in road camps or on sugar beet projects. Women and children Nikkei were forced to move to six inner British Columbia towns.
Conditions in the U.S. Camps
The U.S. internment camps were overcrowded and provided poor living conditions. According to a 1943 report published by the War Relocation Authority (the administering agency), Japanese Americans were housed in "tarpaper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind." Coal was hard to come by, and internees slept under as many blankets as they were alloted. Food was rationed out at an expense of 48 cents per internee, and served by fellow internees in a mess hall of 250-300 people.
Leadership positions within the camps were only offered to the Nisei, or American-born, Japanese. The older generation, or the Issei, were forced to watch as the government promoted their children and ignored them.
Eventually the government allowed internees to leave the concentration camps if they enlisted in the U.S. Army. This offer was not well received. Only 1,200 internees chose to do so.
Legal Challenges to Internment
Two important legal cases were brought against the United States concerning the internment. The landmark cases were Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), and Korematsu v. United States (1944). The defendants argued their fifth amendment rights were violated by the U.S. government because of their ancestry. In both cases, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the U.S. government.
Closure of the Camps
In 1944, two and a half years after signing Executive Order 9066, fourth-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescinded the order. The last internment camp was closed by the end of 1945.
Government Apologies and Reparations
Forced into confinement by the United States, 5,766 Nisei ultimately renounced their American citizenship. In 1968, nearly two dozen years after the camps were closed, the government began reparations to Japanese Americans for property they had lost.
In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed legislation which awarded formal payments of $20,000 each to the surviving internees—60,000 in all. This same year, formal apologies were also issued by the government of Canada to Japanese Canadian survivors, who were each repaid the sum of $21,000 Canadian dollars.
Other Groups in the Camps
While Japanese-Americans comprised the overwhelming majority of those in the camps, thousands of Americans of German, Italian, and other European descent were also forced to relocate there. Many more were classified as "enemy aliens" and subject to increased restrictions. As of 2004, the U.S. Government has made no formal apology or reparations to those affected.

2. This is an article that briefly describes a bunch of information about the Japanese internment camps during World War II. It says why they were formed, the conditions in them, legal challenges to them, when they were closed, and government apologies to the families who had to go through the internment camp process. I chose this article because I was interested in the fact that the government made them seem like they were comfortable places to live. I was interested in if the people that actually lived there felt differently.
3. In the movie that we watched during class about the Japanese internment camps, they were made to seem like pretty descent places to live. The government made it seem that the Japanese Americans were content with their lives in these camps and that they were happy to be there. But Siasoco and Ross say in there article, “The U.S. internment camps were overcrowded and provided poor living conditions.” I’m sure that the government went to the best camp and filmed the video there to make them seem like comfortable places to live. According to the video, I didn’t think that they looked terrible to live in. But the actual conditions must have been worse than the video showed. Another interesting thing that I found out in this article was that only the American Japanese were allowed to be in government positions on the camps. The article says, “Leadership positions within the camps were only offered to the Nisei, or American-born, Japanese. The older generation, or the Issei, were forced to watch as the government promoted their children and ignored them.” In the video, the government made it seem as if all of the Japanese had equal opportunity to be in the governing body of the camps. The video made no mention of the course cases that were brought against the government about the camps. The article explains, “The defendants argued their Fifth Amendment rights were violated by the U.S. government because of their ancestry. In both cases, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the U.S. government.” It is no surprise that the video made no mention of this. These cases were probably a lot like cases that African Americans brought against the government during the civil rights movement. During class we also talked about how when they were allowed to leave the camps, they went back to secure their belongings. But when they did so many of their belongings had been taken and were not saved for them as promised. This article explains that because of this the government issued reparations to make up for their lost belongings.
4. I think it was a good gesture by the government to give the reparations to the Japanese Americans, because clearly taking them to the internment camps was very inhumane. But even the reparations do not compare to what they lost in that three year span that they had to spend in the internment camps. The possessions that many of them lost probably meant a lot more to them than any reparations could. Obviously these internment camps were not nearly as bad as the concentrations camps of Germany, but they still put a huge dent in the progress that Asian Americans had made in America leading up to the war. It is too bad that things like these have to happen when countries go to war.

Media Post #9

1. A transcript for the movie The Patriot can be found at: http://sfy.ru/sfy.html?script=patriot_the


The Patriot. Dir. Roland Emerich. Prod. Dean Devlin, Mark Gordon, and Gary Levinson. Perf. Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger, and Joely Richardson. 2000. DVD. Columbia, 2000.
2. The media item that I will be using is the movie "The Patriot." It is a movie about how a former British war hero in the French and Indian War, Benjamin Martin, organizes a group of militia from South Carolina to battle the British army during the Revolutionary War. During the process he loses two sons and a daughter in law, who give themselves up for the American cause during the Revolutionary War. The reason that I picked this movie is because it is one of my favorite movies. I also thought it had some scenes and lines that had to deal with some things that we have talked about during our class.
3. I think that this movie is related to the movie we watched in class called “Ethnic Notions.” During that movie it said how during the early movie production era, many African American women were overweight and always friendly to their white masters. They were called mammies in that film. I think “The Patriot” displays the mammies also. In the movie, Benjamin Martin’s wife died early in her life, so he had an black slave do the house work and take care of his smaller children during the day, while he was out getting work done. Anyways, the housemaid in this movie was kind of like a mammy from a movie from the 1930’s. She is overweight and is always friendly to Martin and all of his children. She listens to whatever Martin tells her to do and always does it with a pleasant attitude. This reminded me of the mammies that the movie “Ethnic Notions” mentioned. Another thing in “Ethnic Notions” was that in early movies most slaves were always happy to do work for their master. They never rebelled and always obeyed. On Martin’s plantation the slaves are very similar to this. They are happy to work for him and work hard. But in the “Patriot”, Martin and his family treat the slaves very well. He respects them and so do his children. The same goes for his sister-in-law’s plantation. When he sends his young children to her so he can go fight, the slaves on her plantation also are very happy and obey her. They value her so much that when British soldiers come to kill her and Martin’s children, the slaves do not tell the British where they are hiding and even give up their lives for her and the children. Another theme that was discussed in “Ethnic Notions” was the fact that male black slaves were viewed as brutes that were very smart and dumb. This is also the case in “The Patriot.” During the scene where Ben and Gabriel go out and look for militia to join their forces and oppose the British, Ben talks to a man who is unable to fight because of an injury. So he gives a slave to fight in his place. The slave cannot talk very well and can’t write, but he is of large stature and very strong. I think that he accurately depicts a brute the same way earlier films did back in the early 1900's. During the beginning of the fighting, one white man says he would never fight alongside this black man. But after he saves this white man’s life during a battle, he insists that he deserves to be freed after the war. The end of the movie made it seem as if that black man would be free because he fought in the war, but we all know from our readings that this was not the case as slavery continued after the war even for the black slaves that fought during the war.
4. “The Patriot” is right up there as one of my favorite movies. I think the movie may have made a concerted effort to not come off as racist though. In the movie, the Martin’s treat their slaves very well, when in reality at this time most slaves were probably not treated that well by their masters. Also at then end like I just stated in my analysis they made it seem that the black slave that had fought with them would gain freedom and have an excellent life ahead of him. When in reality this was probably not the case. So as a whole I really enjoy the movie, but I think there were a few things involving the blacks in the movie that were probably not accurate.

Media Post #8

1. I found this flyer that was served to help the Japanese Americans along with the evacuation process at this website.
http://peacecorpsonline.org/messages/messages/2629/2028207.html

2. This was a flyer used to simplify the evacuation of many Japanese Americans in the San Francisco area. It was sent out by the Western Defense Command And Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration on April 1, 1942. First of all it told what section of San Francisco this flyer applied to. It said all people would be evacuated by April 7, 1942. It also stated until then that no Japanese Americans could leave that area after April 2 until they were evacuated. It then states that the Civil Control Center would offer advice, provide services to assist them with all of their property and belongings, provide temporary residence for families, and transport a limited amount of their belongings to the interment camp that they would be sent to The last instructions said that the head of the household must report to the Civil Control Station to receive further instructions on Thursday April 2nd or Friday April 3rd. I chose this because became interested in the Japanese internment camps after we watched the movie about them. I also thought there were a few interesting things about the flyer.
3. This item relates to class material because we watched a brief video on the Japanese internment camps in class. We discussed how they were removed from their homes and taken to one room barracks. I wanted to find out how the whole process took place. This flyer is telling the Japanese Americans what they need to do before they are evacuated. I found a few things about this flyer/notice interesting. First of all it was sent out on April 1 and they were to be evacuated on April 7. This is only six days in advance. This had to be quite a shock to the Japanese living in the Pacific. You are living your everyday life, when suddenly you are told you have to go to internment camps in only six days. This had to be quite a shock for them and was probably and extremely hectic period. Also they couldn’t leave their area, so they would have been unable to visit family or friends that lived somewhere else before being evacuated. Another thing that we talked about it class was that the Japanese were not considered to be citizens. This notice reflects that as it says, “All Japanese persons both aliens and non-aliens.” It does not say citizens, instead they were referred to as aliens. One other thing that was discussed was when the Japanese were allowed to leave the internment camps and they went home, they found that there were other people in their houses and that their belongings that were left behind were no where to be found. Interestingly #2 on the list reads, “Provide services with the respect to the management, leasing, sale, storage or other disposition of most kinds of property including: real estate, business, and professional equipment, buildings, household goods, boats, automobiles, livestock, etc.” Clearly this statement was a lie as many Japanese Americans were forced to move elsewhere and create new lives for themselves after the war because all of their previous possessions had been taken by the “American” population.
4. I can’t imagine what I would have done if this had happened to me. I would have been so nervous and would have been anxiety plagued. I also think that it must have been terrible to have to give up valuable or important possessions that meant a lot and then never see them again because when you were gone they were taken. The American government tried to make this action seem harmless in their public service announcement, but that was not the case.

Toledo Race Riots

1. This post is on another article from The Obsidian. The article that I will summarize for you is “Toledo Riots Aftermath: 2 Years Later” by Richard Autry. First of all he basically summarized the situation two years ago in Toledo during the Neo-Nazi march. He said that there were fourteen Neo-Nazis and around 600 rioters of which many were arrested. Many of the African American’s who were arrested were given harsh sentences. Now today Toledo still holds a bad reputation because of this march. Autry says that the reason that the Neo-Nazis came to Toledo was because of a fight between Thomas Synch and his black neighbor. He says that one reason the event got out of hand was because it was so over hyped by the local media. Others wonder why the group was allowed to protest through a residential neighborhood rather than at a building downtown. The mayor at the time Jack Ford said that he had to let them march due to freedom of speech. Other Toledo residents wonder why they weren’t factored into the discussion on whether to let them march. He states that freedom of speech involves peaceful actions not something that would stir up violence like this march did. In the end, Autry insists that the Neo-Nazis won and the city of Toledo lost.


Autry, Richard. “Toledo Riots Aftermath: 2 Years Later.” The Obsidian. 25 Oct. 2007: 4-5.

2. The article was about the Toledo Neo-Nazi march two years ago. It argues that it set up African Americans to get in trouble with the law. He also mentions that Toledo still has a bad reputation, because of this event. He says the ways that the black population in North Toledo were set up were that the march was hyped up so much in the media that the whole city became aware of the event, the citizens of Toledo were not asked on their opinion regarding the march, and the citizens of these northern Toledo neighborhoods were not informed on why the march was being held. The reason that I chose this article is because when I saw the article in the magazine, it reminded me of watching the coverage of this on television. I didn’t really know much about it back then, so I decided to read the article and see what it was all about.
3. I think one way that this article was related to class material is that the black people received very harsh sentences for their actions during the riot. For example, Autry writes, “Olajadai Crenshaw, who was 17-years-old at the time of the riot, was tried as an adult and sentenced to 8 years in prison for allegedly looting and setting fire to a bar.” Those are fairly bad actions, but would a white minor have been tried as an adult and put in jail for 8 years for that crime which was in the heat of the moment? Probably not, that’s where our numerous discussions about white power and privilege come in. A white minor probably wouldn’t have been given as harsh of a sentence. Another thing that disfavored the African Americans was the intense media coverage before the event. Did the white population in Toledo want the media coverage in order to stir up the black population? Another example of privilege in the article had to do with the right to obtain the permit to march. Autry writes in his article, “The question on some African Americans’ mind is if they would be allowed to lead a hate march in a majority white neighborhood. Many feel it would be near impossible to garner a permit and police protection to do this” Josh Newson is quoted as saying, “I know for one thing; if I gathered a racist black group to Ottawa Hills, they lock my a** up!” I think these are excellent points. With their privilege and power, the neo-Nazis had no trouble obtaining a permit and carrying out their demonstration in a primarily black neighborhood. If an African American group asked for a permit to walk through Ottawa Hills, they would probably be turned down. Clearly still today the white population has rights that the black population does not.
4. I think it is sad that an isolated event like this can tear up a city like Toledo for a long time. I remember hearing about this on the news. As a senior in high school, I didn’t really care about the event and I wished they would just stop talking about it. I can remember the coverage on TV lasting weeks before the march was even planned. I do think that this had an effect on the severity of the violence towards the march. I think it was the cities fault because there are restrictions of the law of free speech that are described nicely by Autry when he says, “Hate speech is restricted if it is defamatory or causes incitement to violence.” Clearly the city should have known that this march would cause violence. It is mainly their fault for putting these people in this dreadful situation. I’ll finish this post off with a wonderful quote from Autry that accurately described the whole event. He exclaims, “Many would argue that the city government brought the wood and the media was the gasoline, whereas the North Toledo community was the match that only needed to be sparked.”

Lawrence Summers speech

1. Maybe it would be helpful to just, for a moment, broaden the problem, or the issue, beyond science and engineering. I've had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education. In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession. What does one make of that? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe. One can put it differently. Of a class, and the work that Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz are doing will, I'm sure, over time, contribute greatly to our understanding of these issues and for all I know may prove my conjectures completely wrong. Another way to put the point is to say, what fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don't want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week. What fraction of young men make a decision that they're unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week, and to observe what the difference is. And that has got to be a large part of what is observed. Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I'll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance. To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School. She reports that of her first year section, there were twenty-two women, of whom three are working full time at this point. That may, the dean of the Business School reports to me, that that is not an implausible observation given their experience with their alumnae. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very important reality is just what I would call the, who wants to do high-powered intense work?
The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it's something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.
This is only a small portion of the speech. You can view the rest at http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
Summers, Lawrence. Address. Harvard University. Cambridge, MA.14 Jan. 2005 .

2. The media item is a speech of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers about why there are dramatically fewer women in science and math careers than there are men. The reasons that he talks about in his speech are that the jobs are too much work for them and they aren’t as capable to keep up especially with children, their lesser intelligence at the high end, and the socialization and discrimination that leads women to believe that those jobs are for men. The reason that I chose this was because I had to do a Psychology assignment on an article related to this speech and I was kind of interested in it. Then after thinking about it I realized it also related to our class.
3. I think that this speech relates to the reading “Privilege, Oppression, and Difference.” In this article it was discussed that men have more power and privilege over women. Two of the main areas of discrimination that we discussed in class were in the job force and in education. We talked about how women with the same credentials as men often lose out to men in the hiring process. This is also true with regards into graduate schools around the nation. Summers echoes these discriminatory claims in his speech when he says, “It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population.” With this statement he is pretty much saying that one reason men are more prevalent in high paying jobs within science and math is because men are as a whole smarter than women in these areas. He clearly has a stereotype that men are better inclined to be successful in these areas. He, as the president of Harvard, is a very powerful person in regards to education. He also exclaimed in his speech, “They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women.” With this statement, he is saying that men are more capable to work many hours than women in these high power jobs. But he does mention that we are socialized to think that women need to stay at home and take care of the kids. If women were not socially encouraged to stay at home and look after the house and the kids, than maybe more women would become scientists and engineers.
4. I personally do not agree with him that men are more intelligent than women in science and mathematical areas. I think the main reason you see less women in these professions is because they are socially influenced not to desire these professions. I believe that women are just as capable as men to be scientists or engineers. Another factor that was mentioned in his speech was that people tend to hire people like themselves for positions. So white male scientists hire other white males. This discrimination is another reason there is a big disparity. Lawrence Summers was fired after this speech. He did suggest that men were more intelligent than women in those areas, but I don’t think his overall speech was meant to degrade women. I think he pointed out a couple key points and I don’t think he deserved to be fired.

Media Portfolio Post #5

1. My post is on an article from the Obsidion, BGSU’s student magazine. It is on the article, “Necessary Information or Mid-education” that was written by Shelby Jefferson. Since I could not copy and paste it off of the internet, I will give you a short summary.

The article is about a controversial hip-hop music video that was shown on BET. Biomanni Armah’s song “Read a Book” It contains lyrics full of not so pleasant language like “Read a book, n****! Read a motherf*****’ book! It also has pictures of women in tight clothing with the word book on their behind. Even more astonishing is that Armah maintained that the video was aimed at children and teenagers. He said he wanted to catch the children’s attention place an emphasis on reading. While his intentions may have been good, they are overshadowed by the vulgar language and other negatives. Many people defend him saying at least he’s encouraging them to read rather than other things that most hip hop singers include in their songs. But still this was not the proper way of encouraging.

Here is a link to the video on You-Tube Warning: It contains vulgar language and other content

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN2VqFPNS8w



Jefferson, Shelby. “Necessary Information or Mis-education?” The Obsidian 25 Oct. 2007: 12.
2. The item that I chose is an article in The Obsidion that talked about whether the music video “Read a Book” was appropriate for viewing on BET. The music video was intended to inspire teens and children to read more, but was overshadowed by its questionable content. The author weighed the negatives and the positives of the music video and in the end concluded that the music video had more negatives than positives. While trying to persuade young African Americans to read is a wonderful gesture, using vulgar language, scantily dressed women, and violence is not the way to do it. His music video teaches kids more wrong than right. The reason that I chose this video was because I think it is one of the reasons why stereotypes of blacks never go away. I know my parents would see this video and think that all African Americans speak that way and this would just solidify their negative connotations about blacks. Reasons such as this video are reasons why these negative stereotypes are still strong today.
3. I think that this item relates to a discussion that we have had during the semester. In the reading, Johnson Chapter six, he says that the blame for privilege and power is becuase of social groups. He says that we learn through social groups such as families and the mass media, which is set by people such as family members and public figures. This is one reason that some African American people have trouble moving up the class ladder. Celebrities such as rap and hip-hop composers are looked up to by many black children for their music. If this is what most black kids are looking up to than its no wonder some of them don’t want to read and grow increase their knowledge. A majority of these hip-hop singers encourage kids to do other negative things rather than value education, that only damage their futures. People could say, “He was trying to influence the young African Americans to read and learn so it was a good message.” I don’t see it that way. The main message that they get out of the video is that they are n*****. If African American children take this and other hip-hop tunes to heart than they won’t give themselves a chance to establish a bright future. A commercial during programming encouraging them to read would have been an excellent way to influence kids. But this video, teaches them to continue in devaluing themselves.
4. I am from a small rural town in Ohio so until college I have never really had consistent contact with black people. The only black people that I consistently saw and listened to were the rap and hip-hop singers. Therefore I had some false ideas about black people. In my year and a half on this campus, I have met some wonderful black people. But I have met seen some who talk just like the artists in hip-hop music, devaluing themselves by calling themselves n*****. Back fifty years ago this language would have been terrible to black people. But now the stars that young black children look up to call themselves n***** and some children follow their lead. This saddens me. After everything that the slaves and the civil rights activists had to go through to earn respect in this country for African Americans today, to hear fellow classmates go around calling themselves n***** is really saddening. The majority of black people are great people who work hard. But when people such as my parents who don’t associate with black people very often hear them using the n – word to describe themselves, it ruins all of their respect for African Americans. It is sad that the minority of blacks who don’t respect themselves are the ones that rural white people see most often and who they continue to hold stereotypes of.