Month: April 2019

In order to end racism or to at least help it stop at UNE we need promote some good things that the university is doing to help it. As of right now UNE is ranked 2,242 in diversity in the country which is pretty bad for trying to get diversity into the University. Also it was also brought to my attention that combining portland campus and Biddeford campus the whole university is 12% African American which is very low, but also based on the history of the University almost all the African American students that come to the school end up transferring or dropping out. The school also isn’t helping itself out based on looking around and being around campus we have no African American professors as far as I know at least.  One way that I think that could help is finding a way to be able to make the school more welcoming to that type of crowd, but most people assume that because the school is in Maine that it has a lot of rednecks or racist people due to how country Maine can be sometimes.  This could include recruiting people in order to change some of the diversity.  Another way that could help is the sports teams. With the sports teams the only teams with diversity in them are the football team, and the basketball teams. People have noticed that the women’s teams have no diversity at all which isn’t exactly helping out. The part of coaching that needs to be fixed is that they need to not go based upon what they think is best for the team or the stereotype that African American athletes are the most athletic ones and that the white athletes are the more intelligent ones. Most coaches look into recruiting character or can help the family and sometimes it can make them shy away from the kids who can come from tough places because they’re used to relying on no one but themselves or they could have behavioural issues which personally I find the issue with young coaches or some coaches who have came from places without kids like that. In order to help the other teams is to branch out and take some risks or try to help some of them get out of there situation.  Bring together the team as a whole without the coaches and have some guys go up and talk about some racist stuff that has happened to them during a sporting event in order to get a reaction from the teammates. So the team can come together and eventually want to do something about in order to help our brothers. Doing this could make people start to talk. With the strong ties aspect would be with his teammates and the ability to say something as a whole team or family and not just an individual is a lot more powerful. Then the strong ties could tell there other strong ties such as their parents. Ultimately causing a chain reaction the parents could tell other parents or even come to together and say something to the school which makes them act upon the issue. The sense of having that chain reaction in the weak ties to make something bigger than it actually is huge when your trying to get rid of problem as big as racism. In Kyle Kovers piece when he talks about what happened to Thabo he then immediately goes to the Jazz front office and asks if the whole team can sit down and talk about these issues in Utah so that they can resolve them. For instance with Russell Westbrook the fan who proceeded to yell racist stuff to him got kicked out of the game and band from the arena for life. The Jazz have a history of having a very racist atmosphere in which players are racially profiled a lot. Kyle and teammate Donovan Mitchell decided to speak about it as a team and a organization so that the players wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. Kover also says that if you buy his jersey or come to see a game or anything like that just know what comes along with having my jersey or coming to a Jazz game.

 

Franco Abbatessa

 

How in the blackness project people would change the way they acted in order to not get shot or in trouble. This relates to Yoshino because Yoshino changed himself in order to be accepted in his society due to the fact that being gay in his society wasn’t welcomed. How the whiteness project they talked about what racism they’ve seen or even heard about and not witnessed first hand like the blackness project so how race plays into their lives is how white people have it easier then the black people is something they would agree on. These quotes are examples of how many people in the blackness project feel as though slavery in history continue to affect positions of power.  “For 200 years being told you’re not even a person maybe 2/3’s of a person and then your told well that the  tables are set against you. it’s never been a leveled playing field and that’s stupid too. Anyone who thinks the only way to get out is to put someone below me, that dismisses all of us but they. don’t know that yet.-AS.”Man slavery just damaged everything and everyone until the end of  life i feel like if anything is gonna change with the black culture god will have to come down and wipe this whole world clean and we would have to start over”.  We can see other examples of this in How professionals of color counter bias at work, for example “Mr. Denmark, who is married to Dr. Denmark, has been patted down at courthouses where white colleagues walked in without a search, he said. In his car, he hangs work badges from the rearview mirror so he will always have identification within reach.

“At times I have had to show my license to my own clients before they believed that I was the attorney working on their case,” he said. Another way of showing how in positions of power race plays a roll is how black people are treated by those in the powerful positions of jobs such as, ” Police brutality it doesn’t just happen in New York it happens all over the world as you can see once it went to social media and people had cameras and stuff we were able to see it and not just hear about it..” This helps support it because how now everyone can see the violence that the police use even when they don’t have to just because of the color of someone’s skin. As for the whiteness project people they talked about how nothing like that would happen to them and how police would treat them with respect unlike the black people.

 

“We look at young people today young black americans and we as older black americans say why don’t you understand the struggle. What happen what blanked it all out how could you not see how could you not have heard because it is not there struggle.”

 

” So when he does go to this job interview, when he goes to a certain event and he’s not picked for the color of his skin then he knows how to keep moving..”

 

” He’s up here and i’m down here so i obviously didn’t say anything because he’s been with the company for this many years and i’ve been with the company for this many years, i’m just a black women they’re not going to do anything about it so I said nothing.”

 

“Probably stereotypical thought as to why they  scared of black people from what they see from what they hear they don’t know you but they automatically assume you a certain way because of your color and your race or your neighborhood or where ever you grew up at.”

 

Franco Abbatessa

 

In the world there are people who have issues with people due to race and they show it in different ways. In order to show what they have problems with they asked people what there story is and why they think this way.   One way this is shown is in the whiteness videos we watched and stated how people felt and why.  A person who says this is Alfredo when he says “As a white person I have more freedom to kind of be who I am be who I am but with benefits from the system like college where it does benefit you to be Hispanic and be of the minority. They need that in their college or university. Which I think is a good thing.” Relating this to Yoshino he is basically saying that white people don’t need a false self and it benefits the whites because they can hide something without others knowing due to the fact that they have white skin. But the other look at it is that there are benefits to not being completely white.  Another way this is shown by Liam when he says that ” When you watch the white quarterbacks they’re always being described as so intelligent and I’ve played against white quarterbacks who are faster than 95% of the guys I’ve played against. i’ve also played against black quarterbacks who are smarter than 95% of the guys i’ve played against.”  This shows that even in the sports world there is racism. Liam is saying that white people are just assumed by others to be smarter and that the African Americans are known to be more athletic or assumed to be more athletic. But from the ending of the video he says that he’s played against white kids who are more athletic than everyone and African American kids who are smarter than everyone else on the field. From personal experiences I can say that I have witnessed this happen in sports before with a coach assuming that a kid that is darker than the other kid so the coach immediately assume he could jump higher than the other kid. It shows that sports have a big impact on racism in the world because if you look at the sports world you almost never see some positions that predominantly white in the sport of football. This relates to Yoshino because when he was being judged for being gay in his area and was scared to come out it’s like the same thing with trying to be a running back in the sport of football they won’t highly recruit you because coaches will assume that the black kid is more athletic and faster. It could create a sense of being scared of wanting to compete with other kids due to the stereotype. Even some coaches will take kids in order to raise the team gpa so that the team looks good on paper to incoming recruits so they’ll have some white kids so they can keep the gpa high.