Rebecca Skloot Lecture

Instead of having a regular class this week, we had the privilege of attending a lecture presented by the author of the book we have been reading throughout the semester entitled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The author's name is Rebecca Skloot, and she is a very credited, educated, and accomplished author and teacher. She was nice enough to come to Fairmont State to be a presenter for our Lecture Series.

Rebecca talked for about an hour and a half and touched on different parts of her book, as well as answered questions that the audience had about the book and her life. She began by noting that she spent a lot of time in West Virginia to write the book, as she had friends that allowed her to stay in a secluded house to have a peaceful place to write. She then talked about who Henrietta Lacks was and why she decided to write a book about her. She would read passages out of the book, and then describe what she had read after she was done. She touched on many subject like Henrietta's family, what made Henrietta cells so special, and how they have changed medicine forever. She also spoke about the ethical issues that were involved in taking and distributing Mrs. Lacks cells.

At the end she took questions from the audience, and had a few words of encouragement for the college student to take advantage of every opportunity and don't give up on what you believe in. Overall the lecture was a success, as I got to see an author I admire, hear about some interesting things from the book that I did not realize while reading, and take some valuable life lessons with me. Rebecca Skloot was very inspiring and I am excited to see what she has in store for the future.

Soul Plane

Soul Plane is a movie that takes stereotyping to the extreme. We watched the first half hour of this movie in class on monday, and as it was pretty funny, the messages and ignorance in it was to much to oversee. The movie is based on a man who sues an airline for how he was treated and ends up settling for a large sum of money. With this money he starts his own airline company. He named the company NWA. It is an all African American airline complete with sensuous stewardesses, an onboard dance club, and a bathroom attendant. Chaos ensues in the form of a white family with the unfortunate last name of Hunkee. The father is an uptight, very conservative man, and his son is just the opposite. His son has embraced the hip hop culture and proves this with his dress and speech. We stopped the movie right before the plane had took flight, and popular rapper Snoop Dogg was introduced as the planes inexperienced pilot. 

Overall this movie really broke down not only what black people felt they were being portrayed as in the film industry, but also showed how they felt about white people and their assocation with black culture. It showed many things that people would associate with African Americans and really did not leave much for the imagination. For the most part is was pretty entertaining for what little I saw, and was definitely a good representation of how race, class, and gender is emedded in not only the film industry but in popular culture today.

Bamboozled

We watched Bamboozled in our last class session this monday. In the film Spike Lee takes us on a psychedelic mind trip illustrating the complexities of Black-White interactions. Pierre Delacroix is a creative writer for a cable TV station managed by Dunwitty. Dunwitty is looking for material that will shock audiences to improve ratings. Delacroix initially comes with an idea for a show, Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, where Blacks dress up in Black Face and satirise racism, but the audience appear to miss the point and the humour generated makes Delacroix and his show famous. Driven by greed for fame and fortune, he ignores the racist implications resulting in disastrous consequences.

The message the movie appears to be telling us is that almost all Black entertainment today is made to satisfy the White majority. The movie also directly implies that the mostly-White executives who control the Entertainment channels support Black entertainment mostly in a condescending manner, one that isn't that much different from Slave-era treatment of Blacks. These are all powerful statements to make and Spike Lee argues for their truth through this role-reversal story where economics, class, and race intermingle in a complex manner.

I recommend checking Bamboozled out if you have the patience for dialogue. It is a entertaining movie with some good messages in it. At first I was hesitant about whether or not I would like it, but in the end it turned out to be a pretty interesting film.

Maya Lin

We gave presentations in class this week on different influential figures of race in America. Although a lot of the groups did a great job, I thought that the most interesting presentation given was on architect Maya Lin. She is the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C, as well as many other great accomplishments in sculpting and land art in her short career. She is a Chinese American that was born in Athens, Ohio and after high school she had quite the academic resume. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 from Yale and a Master of Architecture degree in 1986. She has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Yale University, Harvard University, Williams College, and Smith College. She was among the youngest in Yale University when she received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 1987.

In 1981, at age 21 and while still an undergraduate, Lin won a public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, beating out 1,441 other competition submissions. The black cut-stone masonry wall, with the names of 58,261 fallen soldiers carved into its face, was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated on November 13, 1982. The wall is granite and V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument. Lin's conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers.

Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, went on to design other structures, including the Civil Rights Memorial inMontgomery, Alabama (1989) and the Wave Field at the University of Michigan (1995). In 1994, she was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. The title comes from an address she gave at Yale in which she spoke of the monument design process. Talking about the origin of her work, Lin says "My work originates form a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings and this can include not just the physical but the psychological world that we live in."

In 2009, Maya Lin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Her work is very inspiring and innovative. At such a young age, she has accomplished so much and is a good role model for Asian Americans and anyone who respects hard work and commitment to achieving their goals and aspirations.

Experience with Race in College

This week in class was dedicated to the topic of race. Race is something that growing up was not much of an issue for me. I have always tried to never be prejudice or racist towards any other person. Diversity of different races was something that in West Virginia is not often seen. At my high school I don't think that there was more than twenty students that were not white out of some nine-hundred students. Also out of fifty or so teachers there was only two or three that were not white.

It was not until I got to college that I was introduced to many different cultures and races that I previously had no experience with. As a matter of fact, my very first college course was taught by a man from India. In some of my courses I take now, almost half the class is from either a different state or country. Of course Fairmont State University isn't the most diverse setting either. In fact, compared to WVU it is a very small diverse community. At any rate, it is a step up for me, and I embrace it wholeheartedly. I have gained many friendships with people of different race in the past four years, and these are friendships that will last a lifetime. In the end I realized that people of different color and backround are still just people, and while unique in their own ways, are in most cases very similar to myself.

Race, Class, and Gender in Media

In this weeks class, we were asked to team up and work together to find different articles, images, and video that depict either race, class, or gender in media. I was in a group of four and we gathered up all kind of different examples and information to present to the class on these subjects. It was interesting to try and find this information on the web as it was such a broad topic and we could literally use just about anything if we could back it up as to why we used it. Our group ended up getting two examples for each of the three topics. 

For race we showed an article that dealt with Hurrican Katrina. In the article it showed a white woman and a black man fighting through the flood water both carrying different items in their hands. Under the photo their were two captions, the first read a white woman carrying a loaf of bread and some groceries. the other caption said a black man looting a local store. It was an obvious unintentional racist depiction of two people essentially doing the same thing only viewed in a different perspective.

For class we found two photos showing the two extreme sides to class, wealthy and poor. The poor photo showed a white trash pair of men, one in overalls and the other with his shirt off and beer gut hanging out. They were standing in front of a beat up old vehicle outside of a trailer park in a run down part of town. The picture was entitled West Virginia Proud. The other photo was a shot of two high class, well dressed, jewelry covered females that were in a bright red corvette in a upscale part of Beverly Hills. They both seemed very materialistic and perfect from head to toe.

Finally for gender, we had two group photos of both men and women. For the women, the photo was out of Maxim Magazine and showed all of the females that did spreads for Maxim during 2010. All of the women looked about the same, they were all what the media would describe as the perfect females, skinny, big breasts, big butt, all of which really didn't have a flaw on them. The male photo was from a body building magazine in the same format, where it was just the men that had been featured through 2010. All of these men were tall, dark, and solid muscle. These two pictures I think showed how the media tries to make people think that they need to look this way to be relevant. I however think both the men and women in the photos looked phony and desperate. I think to focus on your looks as much as these people do shows weakness in one's self esteem.

This assignment was really interesting to do. It was fun to work with my group and get others opinions on the assignment. Overall it was good project that showcased exactly what is wrong with the media these days on three important subjects.

The Longest Yard

In our latest class, we watched the movie “The Longest Yard”. She picked this movie to point out certain aspects of masculinity depicted throughout the film. It is clear from the first scene that this was a “mans” movie. The movie is about a once pro football player named Paul Crew that is notoriously known for shaving points on a football game who ends up being imprisoned for stealing his girlfriends car and going on an all out drunken police chase. While in prison he is asked to lead a team of inmates against the guard’s football team in a “tune-up” game to start off the guard’s season.

            

The character’s in this movie were all mostly male, and for the most part they all were roided out jocks. The guards were all big tough no nonsense guys, that had little remorse for Mr. Crew or the rest of the inmates. The inmates were mostly the same as the guards. They all joked around with one another, and were ready to fight at any moment. This movie showcases the competitiveness of men when put around one another. The majority of the inmates were very happy that they get the chance to hit the guards that ridicule them on a daily basis. The guards were equally pleased to beat up on the prisoners and blow them out on the field. The black inmates at first were hesitant of joining the team due to Paul Crew’s reputation of turning his back on his team, but Crew earned their trust and respect by taking a beating in a pick up basketball game. We stopped the movie right as the team had been fully assembled and were preparing for the big game.

            

All in all from what we watched, this movie had many instances of masculinity throughout. The men’s attitudes and demeanor in this film reminded me of Social Darwinism. It had a “dog eat dog” or “survival of the fittest” tone to it. The male characters had very few feminine traits about them, and there were very little female roles. Between all the testosterone, fighting, hitting, and dirty comedy infused action, The Longest Yard was a great example of a masculine film.