Category: Paper

• 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.

 

Franco Abbatessa

 

True identity and False identity

 

In life people try to fit in whether it is into a group of friends, to be liked or they change how they dress in order to be cool. In your life have you ever changed something about yourself in order to be liked or to fit in? Why was it necessary to hide parts of yourself or identity? In the writing by Kenji Yoshino he states that the False self is shown when the True self is in danger. The way that Yoshino states this is in paragraph 14 when he says “The False Self has one positive and very important function: to hide the True Self, which it does by compliance with environmental demands.” When kenji says this he means that when in a environment that is unstable or uncomfortable for the True Self the False Self will protect it in order to keep it safe. This can happen to everyone when you are uncomfortable and try to fit in you become someone you aren’t which is the False Self.

Identity comes in many forms it can change based upon many different things. Kenji Yoshino he’s writing this because of the hardships he went through with being gay in a place where it is not that welcome there. One of the hardships that he faces is when he has made himself a False Self in order to hide the real him, Yoshino states when his False Self is show by saying “My gay self, The True Self was hidden behind an ostensibly straight false self. Yet it would be wrong to cast the closest self purely inimical to the gay one. In my adolescence, this False Self protected the True Self until its survival was assured.” This how he kept himself from being hurt or shamed. Did this false self hurt him in the long run? He answered this when he said, “Only at this point did the False Self switch from being a help to being a hindrance. And even after I came out, the False Self never disappeared. It was reduced to the minimum necessary to regulate relations between the True Self and the world.” (Paragraph 16) The False Self is almost a way of being able to fit in and be something your not until your True Self in ready to be seen.  The false self was harder on himself then the true self by itself. When he says it’s a hindrance he’s saying that it obstructed the real him from being able to fully come out.

The other part is the True Self which usually hides behind whatever your hiding behind it also is the real you. The True Self to Kenji is “The True Self is the self that gives an individual the feeling of being real, which is “more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have self into which to retreat for relaxation.” The True Self is associated with human spontaneity and authenticity: “Only the True Self can be creative and only the True Self can feel real.” (paragraph 13) The meaning of this is that the true self can be shown once you feel whole with yourself or comfortable to be in your own and just be you. When the True self comes out it means that you are finally not afraid of who you are and also want to finally be heard and seen for you and not for the False Self.  Another way that this is stated is when he says “(Here I follow Winnicott, who observes the True Self is not susceptible to specific definition, as its nature differs for each of us.) In talking about classic civil rights groups. I have focused on the demand to conform to the mainstream because I think that for most groups (except women) these are the demands that most threaten our authenticity. But I am equally opposed to demands that individuals reverse cover, because such demands are also impingements on our autonomy, and therefore on our authenticity.” (paragraph 30)  This is the second way of looking at True Self from Yoshino’s eyes when he says the line “is not susceptible to specific definition, as its nature differs for each of us,” he is saying that all true selves aren’t the same because everyone’s different so the true self of someone is their own special person. When Yoshino ends the essay he makes a point to be accepting of your true self and not to hide because it will hurt yourself and cause damage to your well being.

 

Have you ever asked or thought to yourself what is my identity? What does it actually do for me? What does a identity mean to you? Identities in this world can mean a multitude of things from just being someone’s name to where they grew up. An identity is formed by many things in this world. They can bring people together but they can also divide people in many ways. When I think of an identity I think like your social security, the way you act, who you grew up with/ where you grew up, and maybe the name you have. There are so many different types of identities in this world and people take advantage of it sometimes.             Identities can do multiple things for people, if you have a last name that is known by a town or a bunch of people your identity is that name and what comes along with it is a responsibility to show that you take over that name. Kwame states that “I think we run into dangers when we allow our identities to push us around, to make us do things we don’t actually want to do or need to do, just because we feel that’s what a black person would do or that’s what a white person would do or that’s what a Republican person would do. These identities can make all sorts of demands on us, and often that can overwhelm who we are as unique individuals”. Another way that they help us is that they give us a sense of who we are and how we stand out from everyone else and show how we can be individuals. Just like how white guys think they have to act a certain way and black people act a certain way that is how they divide us somehow to see that not everyone is the same and people can be different then one another just based on there identities.                   Have you ever just thought to yourself does who I am and where I come from really matter? Kwame answers this question by saying “The short answer is that identities are labels that we use to group each other. When you take one seriously, when you identify with a label, then you think of it as giving you reasons to do things and not to do things. If you’re a Catholic, you have reasons to obey the Catholic church and its teachings. You have reasons to help with Catholic organizations, and all the people associated with it, and that’s what makes it social”. What I got from that was that no matter what way you look at an identity it is always going to matter to someone. The reason being if we didn’t have them would we know whos who in this world? The answer to that is clear we would have no idea who was who and that would cause everyone to be the same so then there is no identities. Although you may not need them for certain things, they still matter because then there is no such thing as social security. If you look at them from a school perspective without them there would be no jocks, nerds, and pretty sure that wouldn’t be good for a school. They just matter all around in general they help the world what it is today. Also the example of what if we go into times square and just look around at people what would you do. You’d look around and start putting people in categories and by doing that and judging people it is ultimately. helping yourself for protection and  knowing what to look out for.