Category: ENG 123

• Ranked 2,242 in ethnic diversity in the country.
• Alliance
• Black student union
• Cultural council
• Maine is trying to get a more young crowd by helping pay student loans when you graduate
• Muslim students
• Relay for life.
• Me personally I help coach special olympic teams to build upon some changes in the university i almost advertise the school. To all my friends in high school i tell them about my school
• United multicultural club
• The coaches of the team could help us by branching out. They also treat all the kids of color differently than everyone else.  We have a very old coach on the team who is a old school coach. He wasn’t accepting of color in his time.
• Having a predominantly white university scares away the people of color because they think there is racism.
• Most students that go here that are african american usually don’t finish school here. They end up transferring.
• We also don’t have teachers of color which is also probably pushing people away.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Franco Abbatessa

 

I Just Wanna be Average Essay

 

Social identity can shape the way we think about our goals and dreams. When living in a unsafe neighborhood and being influenced by a culture of violence one goal is to stay alive. When growing up in a society with low expectations and a lot of nonsense happening can cause someone to just want to be average or have a normal life.  In I Just Wanna be Average, Mike Rose is a son of southern Italian immigrants who moved to southern LA in hopes of living the American Dream but they don’t get what they’d hope for. In the neighborhood where Rose grows up there’s a lot of poverty and low expectations, at first  causing Rose to have a unnatural set of priorities. In Rose’s early life he went through a lot and forced him to focus on stuff you wouldn’t normally do as a kid.

Comparing Rose to Coates there are many differences in their early life. For Rose his family they had to work with what they could just like when he says “used my mother’s engagement ring as a down payment, and moved to 9116 South Vermont Avenue, a house about one and one-half miles northwest of Watts. The neighborhood was poor, and it was in transition.” “pg. 12”  When Rose says this it shows his struggle that his family is going through right away and later on in this paragraph he says that all types of people live there like some old retired white guys, the young black people moving in from Watts, and then some immigrant Mexican families were even moving in. This states how much money his family has along with what they were working for. For Coates when he was growing up he was going through some similar stuff as Rose, just like when Coates said that sometimes he couldn’t afford to eat some nights. This shows how Coates and Rose had some similar struggles in their early lives.    Both of them had different people around them when they were growing up and different types of people to talk to and learn from. But they also had different forms of violence in their areas.   For Coates his neighborhood was much worse then Rose due to where Coates grew up. In Baltimore at his time of growing up it was very unsafe. Coates made this clear when he said “The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was 1986…” pg. 19″This means that in his neighborhood there was a lot of gun violence and gang violence. It had to have been pretty bad if they gave a little kid a gun in order to protect himself. Then in Rose’s neighborhood there was more drugs and kids doing stupid things in order to get in trouble. This is shown when Rose says “But the anger and frustration of South Vermont could prove too strong for music’s illusion; then it was violence that provided deliverance of a different order. One night I watched as a guy sprinted from Walt’s to toss something on our lawn. The police were right behind, and a cop tackled him, smashing his face into the sidewalk…..” pg. 17″This shows what would happen in Rose’s neighborhood compared to Coates if you look at the way they spoke about there neighborhoods you would know right away that Coates was a lot more harsh and violent then Rose. They both did suffer from violence in their early lives Coates just happened to be a lot worse.

The both of them have had an  encounter with the American dream and they both were wrong about it. For Rose his mother had said “it was nothing she was told” that nothing she was promised so much and none of it came true. For Coates it was when he was talking about the block parties, the barbeques, the driveways, and stuff like that. He realizes that the world is nothing like that and he was lied to. They both realize this pretty quickly causing them to view the world through there neighborhoods instead of what they make of it.

In conclusion Coates and Rose had very similar lives but in different ways they both had something that was worse than the others. But in the end they both came out on top and turned their lives around and didn’t let there social identities get the best of them. When comparing their lives they both had equally as bad times growing up but some things were better for Rose and the same for Coates. For Coates where he is living and being black was always difficult because of how everyone else was in his neighborhood because everyone was doing drugs or selling them or in gangs.  In order to turn his life around he would use a false self in order to keep himself from being shot or beat up after school and to keep the gangs away from him. For Rose he would stay distant from everyone else in order to make sure that he wouldn’t get in trouble like some of his pupils. When Rose would want to stay away from everything he would hide and do some chemistry along with studying the stars. With Rose he had to find away to stay motivated because of the people he was surrounded by a bunch of old drunk guys with no motivation. Coates and Rose both of their identities were shaped by how their society tried to force them to conform to be something they’re not.

 

Work Cited

Rose, Mike. “Lives on The Boundary.”  I Just Wanna Be Average, Penguin (1989): 11-37.

 

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Between The World And Me.”  Between The World And me, volume number.issue number (2015): 6-39.