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.