Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Created January 6, 2020
Community? Engagements? Arts? Well, for starters this is a class taught at Transylvania University in Lexington, KY by professors Kremena Todorova and Kurt Gohde. The goal of this class is to form a relationship with the community by engaging in artistic projects with the community. The outcome of this will manifest itself in many ways, some recognizable and others not so much.
CETA 2020: Our first 2 emojis (of hundreds)
Created January 6, 2020
Individual Tasks
Collect addresses, make & write thank-you cards, design pronoun buttons--Anna Davis
Blog Manager--Paige Wessling
Recorder/archivist for This I Believe essays--Sarah Metcalfe
Social Media--Lydia Baggett & Garrett LeVan
Photographic Inventory (3 people)--Yousef Alsdudi, Sarah Bennett, & Faith Boles
Space, raw material, & tool inventory manager AND order enforcer--Emily Neat
Quality Control & Class Ethicist--Alex Toney
Software Design Team (3 people)--Shelby Barker, Emily Cecil, & Abby Pearson
Fabrication Team (3 people)--Brooklyn Greer, Will Hemingway, & Marissa Price
Finishing Team (4 people)--Nannie Baze, Emon Daneshmand, Ally Frederick, & Madison Phillips
Additional photographic documentation--Kremena and Kurt
Working with production design at Kre8Now Makerspace--Kurt and Kremena
Publicity for the class--Kremena and Kurt
Securing materials needed--Kurt and Kremena
As I read this section of Citizen, two sections really stood out to me. First, the section speaking about/comparing the killing of Mark Duggan in comparison to Rodney King's beating. I have never heard of Duggan nor the Hackney riots. This truly broke my heart. I realize that it did not occur in my country, but it is still a massive tragedy that I never heard of. A man, innocent of the crimes he was accused of, was murdered for his race. And I didn't hear of it. I think my lack of knowledge is a part of the problem. How can I be a help to finding a solution if I am not even actively making myself aware of the tragedy of racism that befalls people. Bliss is not always peaceful. Secondly, the section that spoke about the man sitting on the train broke my heart as I read it. I have been in situations like that before where people stand to avoid sitting next to a person of color in the doctor's office or even at a college party. It truly breaks my heart that people feel a fear that has no ounce of truth. I believe the moral of this story is that everyone needs to sit. Show people there is no reason to act like an asshole and no reason to fear. Show love and acceptance, you never know what the empty space is causing that person to feel inside.
ReplyDeleteThere is no reason to be scared. Being kind to people will more than likely result in someone being kind to you. Sometimes we just have to take the first step
DeleteI think this book is very interesting partly because it is so thought provoking. It brings to light many situations that people ted to ignore because it makes them uncomfortable, but in this book Rankine does not shy away from that. She tells stories of overt and covert acts of racism and prejudices. I think it is very important that she talks about both because when people think about racism or prejudice they tend to think of larger scale things like hate crimes rather than seemingly small things such as microaggression. Which in reality both have negative implications.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find most striking about the end to Citizen and the book as a whole, is the author's, Claudia Rankines, method of expressing the ever existing and prominent racism within modern society and its affect on the black community. Through her powerful mix of essay and poetry style writing, the audience becomes invested in her portrayal of the day to day life of a black person in the twenty first century. The reader begins to feel, on a very small scale, the reality, impact and constancy of racism in our "modern" society. If Rankine had simply written her book stating factual evidence of racism in a formal manner, the audience may not have been as invested. However, her style captures every reader leaving us in tears and horror at the state of racism today. Further her use of personal, mainstream and historical examples strengthens her depiction showing how widespread racism is within the world and within the span of time.
ReplyDeleteI, too, am moved by Rankine's book over and over again. I feel the same way you do: the personal wins over any possible official statistics and the like...
DeleteI find the ending statement very interesting. While in the most literal sense she is stating that her time on the court was just a lesson, not a game, I think it connects very much to the previous story of the woman moving her car.
ReplyDeleteA couple of days ago when talking about the ERA, someone said something along the lines of, “Giving equal rights to one group doesn’t take the rights from another. Everyone can share.”
I think this connects in that people seem to think that giving people of color equal rights and fair treatment means that white people lose something. It isn’t a match. There does not have to be a winner and a loser. Everyone can be on the same team, but generations of structural racism and sexism have created an us vs. them mentality for so many people.
While there are differences between everyone, it isn’t a match. We can all learn about these differences and work to make the world a better place through lessons in understanding and recognition of privileges.
You put this so well, Madison. I couldn't agree with you more.
DeleteIn "Stop and Frisk," a repeating phrase really stuck with me: "And still you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description." Racism is blatant, but also internalized. This quote reminds me on an Anthropological term - structural violence. Basically it means there are forms of violence inflicted on persons (typically of color) by the social institutions around them, and this is the perfect example. Police bias is just so ridiculous honestly and in my opinion - racism in its true and horrifying form. To assume someone will act a certain way or be "genetically disposed" to criminal activity is racism.
ReplyDeleteWhat a scary thing structural violence is. And how apt the name of it...
DeleteI found it very interesting that I am watching a documentary for another class about the same topic. In my Women in Education class I am waiting the doc, “Black Is....Black Isn’t.” This Is a documentary from the 90s that touches on many topics in regards to being Black.
ReplyDeleteThe documentary talked more about how people have felt about the word Black and how they fit into that community. Watching the documentary gave me a different perspective while finishing the book.
“Society will not let you forget that you are Black.” This is a phrase that was said in the film and I think it ties in well to the book. Rankines has talked in the novel about her own relationships with white people and how she feels as if she is never not seen as any thing other than a Black woman.
Both the documentary and book have given me many things to think about and reflect on.
Over and over again I am struck by how personal Citizen is. It begins with the narrator’s memory of her white classmate at Sts. Peter and James School who is able to express gratitude only through racially offensive language. It ends with the narrator telling another short and lyrical story: of a white woman who refuses to park her car facing the narrator’s. “It was a lesson,” the narrator concludes ambiguously, a fitting ending to a book that refuses to be classified generically and that offers personal stories in the place of statistics, authority opinions, and measurable data.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I connect with the situation on each one of these stories. I agree it is very personal and you learn so much about each story in every chapter
DeleteOne line that struck me in Citizen was the statement "And yes, I want to interrupt to tell him her us you me I don't know how to end what doesn't have an ending" (159). I took this to mean that Rankine doesn't know how to end the book about racism if racism is an ever-prominent, ongoing thing. How does one find the last story they want to tell before the book ends? The book could continue to go on and on.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree. The melancholy of the last story is part of Rankine's inability to end conslusively.
DeleteIn a section that focuses on Black people being routinely and unjustly frisked, beaten, shot dead by police officers, the narrator writes, “Grief comes out of relationships to subjects over time and not to any subject in theory” (117). How I hear her words is as a call to nurture relationships across lines of color. In my case as a white woman, this means relationships with non-white people. Because if we are in relationships, we will be able to grieve and unable to frisk, beat, shoot dead. As the narrator points out, grief is hard to feel for theoretical subjects, people imagined in the abstract.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I take from Citizen is to move closer to seeing people relationally, not abstractly.
As a white man that lives in a nation full of racism, I feel like I do not know enough about it to make a difference. Mark Duggan and Rodney King were both African Americans who were murdered, and I have never heard of either of them before now. The part that made me the most upset was that Mark Duggan was a father. I couldn’t imagine my dad getting murdered, especially for doing nothing wrong. I think I need to do a better job of educating myself on these acts of racism, and look to make a positive change. If I am unaware of a terrible situation, then I will not know what to do when it happens to someone that I know. These acts are disturbing and while they don’t happen every day, there are still people being murdered simply because of their skin color. It only takes one person you care about to lose their life before it becomes an issue for someone. Let’s try and stop it before it happens by being educated on these awful situations.
ReplyDeleteI really relate to you on this. As a white individual it is sometimes hard for me to first hand experience all of the racial injustices that happen around me. Reading these stories was really disturbing and made me want to play a more active role in stopping racial discrimination.
DeleteThe part that really stood out to me in this section was on page 134. Claudia Rankine lists the names of four black men that have died at the hands of police brutality: Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Gardner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown, all of which I have not heard of. After their names, she lists “in memory” until it fades into the bottom of the page. This really stood out to me because I see it as powerful indication of the future casualties she predicts “because white men can’t police their imagination black men are dying” (pg. 135). I really enjoyed this book, Rankine’s relentless picture of reality made my skin crawl. No matter how the reader identifies, she forces the reader to encounter the shame and profiling black bodies endure. The heavy-handed bluntness she incorporates into her prose leaves no room for excuses or comfort. She is determined to portray the experience as plainly as she can.
ReplyDeleteLike Garret discussed, I also have white privilege. Reading this book made things more real to me and able to connect to it. Because there were fathers that were murdered I think about my own father, and think about how worse it would be if he was murdered because of his color. Books like these are what more people should read. It gives black people, or any person of color the chance to have a voice and to be heard. The stories in this book are heart breaking, and extremely unfair. The page that I found most compelling was on 134. It was a list of names "In memory of Jordan Russel Davis" and so on. The bottom of the list it just said "In memory of..." because that showed that there will be more tragic events due to racism. I want the "In memory.." list to stop. I want murders, and killings, to stop.
ReplyDeleteIn the second half of Rankine's novel, I found the scripts for situation videos simultaneously intriguing yet confusing. This is mainly because I am unfamiliar with what situation videos are. Also, a lot of the situations addressed (like the soccer incident) I have never heard about. This is most likely a result of my own white privilege. As mentioned by my peers, white privilege is something I also have personally, and it usually manifests in the ability to be indifferent, uninformed, and unengaged in events or things invoking race issues.
ReplyDeleteAs I read the second half of Rankine's novel I found the first script and the in memory script extremely interesting and touching. This book focuses very deeply on issues I'm generally aware of, but like other students said this isn't something we're super knowledgeable about. It is unfortunate because it is something that is extremely important in our culture. I can only assume that our unintentional white privilege has kept us from this, something that could be fixed easily by being more aware and sensitive.
ReplyDeleteAs Emily Neat mentioned, I also found the scripts for the situation videos confusing. Maybe we can talk about what situation videos are as a class tonight. Overall, I really enjoyed this book, even though parts of it were hard to read. I learned a lot from this text that I did not know probably because of my white privilege. In this second section, I was especially drawn to the "Stop-and-Frisk" excerpt. As I read this section, I was shocked by the calm nature of the speaker's voice; even though they were discussing being handled aggressively and taken to the police station all because of the color of their skin, they knew they couldn't speak out against what was happening to them because it would make the situation worse. This book really opened my eyes to the fear and anxiety black people have just because of the color of their skin.
ReplyDelete