Alex’s WSC 119 Blog

The issue that I am looking to explore in my Storytelling As Resistance project is the way that the coronavirus pandemic, and the way that people have responded to the various troubles that it has caused, has beautifully illustrated what privilege in America looks like. This is important to me for a few reasons. First of all, as a graduating senior, I am very much directly affected by the coronavirus pandemic in way that exist outside of the obvious realm of health. The pandemic has robbed me of my final semester of college, my commencement ceremony, the last few months with the friends that I have spent making for four years, and all of the  job opportunities that I have worked tirelessly for since the day I arrived on campus. While I feel completely accountable for being upset about missing this events and the past few months have obviously not been ideal, I still maintain the sense of self required to realize that my problems are so minute compared to the vast and dark reality that many people around the globe are facing. Many people have lost loved ones, lost the only member of their household who earns a paycheck, been laid off from careers they have been working toward for decades, are unable to feed their families, are homeless and are scared. So to see people on social media and in conversation acting as though they have suffered some great loss because they are unable to walk across a stage in a cap and gown this month reflects a serious tone deafness to the actual struggles that are being faced by so many people who are less fortunate.

I think this message, while potentially harsh, should be heard and felt by many people who benefit from privilege in our society. While my anecdotal experience and personal feelings may pertain more directly to my direct peers at Hofstra University, the underlying message is more of an umbrella that can be used to ground people and force them to realize how much they have to be thankful for, as opposed to how much they have to complain about.

I am tentatively exploring the idea of conveying my message through podcast. Through generative writing exercises I have been able to form a lot of linear thoughts and put them down onto paper as a way to organize what I would like to accomplish, the methods by which I would like to do so, and the disclaimers that I may need to give in order to adequately express my point. Initially, I thought that I would write a traditional essay, as that is what I am most comfortable doing and how I am most used to expressing my thoughts. However, during the breakout session of last week’s class, one of my classmates heard me express my ideas verbally and urged me to consider exploring a podcast as a medium. I think this would be an interesting medium to explore, while also getting me out of my comfort zone.

I think Aja Y. Martinez’s use of storytelling as a kind of resistance was an extremely powerful tool, and there are so many moments within the allegory that resonated with me as a reader. What is impactful about utilizing storytelling in this way, and through the use of fictional characters, is you can capture so many tropes and examples within one concise story. My absolute favorite and arguably the most impactful moment to me as a reader was at the beginning when Dr. Rosette Benitez was attempting to assimilate with students who would at times make disparaging comments about Mexican Americans in her presence.

“And although she felt a twinge of discomfort when her peers made derogatory statements about Mexicans, Rosette felt slightly heartened when they’d follow up such remarks with an obligatory smile and “Of course you’re nothing like them Rosette” (Casas, 2005, p. 39). Rosette felt better being embraced by her peers as an exception to the rule rather than not being accepted at all.” (Martinez, p. 4).

The reason why this moment was so impactful to me, and likely many other readers, is because many of us have been in this exact situation.  For me, it instantly brought up memories of high school when groups of my friends, or even my family, would make disparaging comments about “stereotypically flamboyant” gay men. They would say things like “I am so glad you don’t act like them”. This is such a painful thing to here because it makes you feel like those around you merely tolerate you despite your difference, as opposed to accepting you. Reading this part of the passage made me angry that this is something that occurs so commonly and made me feel inclined to object the next time I hear something to this affect, as opposed to sheepishly smiling and trying to accept it as a compliment as I have done my whole life. The fact that this passage inspired me to feel this way is a testament to how powerful Martinez’s story telling as resistance is, and within itself proves its own effectiveness. 

            This passage as a whole also reminded me of something I witnessed in pop culture today. Controversial conservative Kaitlin Bennet, who first garnered national attention when her senior photos at Kent State depicted her carrying firearms around campus to illustrate her support of the second amendment, tweeted something wildly controversial today. She wrote: “Honestly, letting women vote in this country wasn’t one of the best ideas. Females vote with emotion and overwhelmingly support Democratic feel-good policies that take away our ACTUAL rights. I’d rather lose my ‘right’ to vote than lose my right to defend myself with a firearm!”. To me, this is an extreme version of doing something similar to what got Dr. Benitez into some hot water in the reading. In my opinion, Kaitlin Bennet realizes that her supporters are primarily straight white men who are radically conservative. I think this tweet was an attempt to show that group of people the she is “not like most women” and would rather lose a woman’s right to vote than the right to bear arms. However, much like Dr. Benitez at the end of the allegory, she would quickly realize that the men who she is attempting to cozy up to, regardless of how much anti-feminist propaganda she spews, will never accept her as an equal or take her best interests to heart. It is a very dangerous game to play and I think that Aja Y. Martinez’s storytelling illustrates a very important point that, evidently, many people in today’s society still need to hear.

Works Cited

Martinez, Aja Y. (2013, August 7). Critical race theory counterstory as allegory: A rhetorical trope to raise awareness about Arizona’s ban on ethnic studies. Across the Disciplines, 10(3). Retrieved from https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/race/martinez.cfm

What initially struck me when reading From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle by Min-Zhan Lu was the dynamic and ever evolving relationship she had with her own bilingual abilities and how it reflects the complicated way that everyone, especially women, view themselves from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood. 

At the beginning of the essay, the writer reflects on having a “family language” that was separate from the language she spoke at school. When reflecting on her experiences in second grade, she writes:

“I noticed the puzzled faces of my class- mates. I had the same sensation I had often experienced when some stranger in a crowd would turn on hearing me speak English. I was more intensely pleased on this occasion, however, because suddenly I felt that my family language had been singled out from the family languages of my classmates. Since we were not allowed to speak any dialect other than Standard Chinese in the classroom, having my teacher speak English to me in class made English an official language of the classroom. I began to take pride in my ability to speak it.”

This reminded me of many social experiments that have been done where girls in this age group tend to be self-confident in their differences and aspire to have ambitious careers as scientists/doctors/etc. These studies then find that as one goes through the transition from child to adolescent, one becomes more self-conscious about their differences. Everyone wants to fit in and hide the aspects of themselves that make them different. I think Min-Zhan Lu’s experience speaks to this in a really powerful way as it brings culture and feelings of nationalism into the equation. However, in a broader sense, it speaks to how society as a whole likes to condemn people for what sets them apart as opposed to welcoming the differences of others. Min-Zhan Lu even writes about adults who would condemn her parents for teaching her English, when they believe that Russian had replaced English and the acceptable second language to learn. It is because of behaviors like this when children, especially females, grow up in society they are bombarded with issues of self-confidence and are made to feel like suppressing their abilities or talents will make them more palatable to the general public. This is counter-productive and results in less enriched members of society.

This piece of writing also made me personally evaluate the way that I think of people who speak more than just one language, as I do. At my job at Starbucks in Uniondale, Long Island, I frequently find myself getting frustrated attempting to communicate with people who don’t speak English very well. Min-Zhan Lu writing made me remember how much harder these people have had to work in order to work in order to be able to adequately express their thoughts in two languages. While I may find it frustrating that someone cannot seem to order a cup of coffee in English, the person I am getting frustrated with is actually more advanced than me in language as a whole, because they are adept at two languages and I am confined to only the one that I speak. Many people in our American society look down on people with thick/accents or broken English, but it is truly those bilingual individuals that are the more advanced. 

Going into our conversation about language equality, I was immediately reminded of my work in Professor Lotier’s class last semester that touched on this concept. While I had never considered the implications of language equality before, I was very quick to understand the concept and realize that systemic change must be made in order to compensate for the decades of academia that rewarded students who grew up in middle-class American white households, and fail to take into account that while other racial backgrounds speak and articulate their points via a different vernacular, that does not make their points any less valid and therefore they should have a place in academia as well.

At its core, the issue that I have identified is as follows. The purpose of higher education institutions is to prepare students for their life and professional endeavors post-graduation. However, the concepts, especially as they pertain to writing a rhetoric, that are drilled into our minds since our earliest days in elementary school, are concepts that don’t typically exist outside the walls of academic institutions. The five-paragraph essay, for example, is something that I have spent nearly a decade refining and perfecting, however all evidence points to the fact that after May 17, 2020 I may never need to write one again. The same can be said for conventional English. 

The conventional/academic English that is shoved down students’ throats since we began learning how to read is primarily the language spoken by academics. If academia is intended to prepare students for life after graduation, why does it spend so much time teaching us how to speak to those within academia?

I don’t want to beat around the bush or act as though this systemic problem negatively affects all students equally. Students’ Right to Their Own Language poignantly points out, “We need to ask ourselves whether our rejection of students who do not adopt the dialect most familiar to us is based on any real merit in our dialect or whether we are actually rejecting the students themselves, rejecting them because of their racial, social, and cultural origins.”

Personally, I am a white male college student who was born and raised in Massachusetts and my mother was an English major in college. It should come as no surprise to you that conventional English, both spoken and written, comes fairly naturally to me. For years in high school my peers and instructors commended me on my “strong writing abilities” and my “ability to communicate well”. However, this was more because of my background and had less to do with my actual skills. Black students are unfairly critiqued for the way they speak and write, even though they may be doing the exact same thing that I was doing: speaking and writing in the way that they were accustomed to based on how they grew up. However, while I was praised for my “ability”, these other students now must learn how to speak and write using a set of rules they were not familiar with. This reinforces the point made by SRTOL, that academia is not rejecting writing incompetence, it is systematically rejecting students of diverse racial, social, and cultural origins.

The excerpt from Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” that I chose to analyze is the last two paragraphs on page 44.

In this excerpt, Freire is asserting that to move away from oppression, one cannot simply soften the power that the oppressor has over the oppressed. All this does is illustrate “generosity” on the part of the oppressor, between their acts of oppression. The only way the oppressed is to be liberated is through their own weakness. An example of this is in the matter of gay rights, giving homosexual couples legal civil unions while not granting them the legal right to get married is softening the power of the opressor, however only reinforces the power they have over the opressed. 

He also states that, “in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors”. This point really resonated with me, as I think throughout human history you can see examples of oppressed parties finally gaining liberation or freedom from oppression, and in turn using this new found liberation to assert their dominance over another marginalized group. Again, I can relate this back to the LGBT community, which is often marginalized or oppressed by the heterosexual community. However, within the community itself there is a lot of judgement and oftentimes prejudice against intersectional members of the group. For example, Black trans women face a significantly harder time being accepted by the community than white gay men. You would think that a community of people who know firsthand what it feels like to be discriminated against would be free of oppression, however to Freire’s point, that is not the case.

I can agree that softening the power of the oppressor is not sufficient, because as Freire puts forth, in order for there to be generosity, there has to be acts of oppression as well. However, he also states that, “Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.” At first glance, I did not agree with this point. However, in the context of racism I can agree that the burden falls to the oppressed group to educate the oppressive society on matters of oppression and discrimination, and without this dialogue, there would be no liberation of any oppressed groups. I think Freire’s point is that oppressors will always continue to oppress and liberation will not be reached unless the group of oppressed people are active in educating and advocating for their liberation. This is a point that is unfortunate, but I agree with.