Its kind of universal

When thinking about race most of us think about black and white. Why wouldn’t we? When looking about at things like the civil rights movement and the race riots those are the two prominent entities involved. But if anything can be said about racism is that it encompasses many different people and colors a religion. In crash it wasn’t just the white officers pulling over the black couple, or the black boys stealing a white person’s car. It was also a Mexican man being constantly considered a bad person because of his identity. No one expected better from him because of the stereotype given to most Mexicans, in this movie specifically it was "cheater" and "gangbanger". The Iranian man had it even worse because people automatically considered him connected with the terrorists, which is a common misconception in this country. All of these characters put together showed how much discrimination in America persists against everybody. It’s not right, but that doesn’t change anything. This kind of hits close to home for me because the reason my family and I had to leave Ukraine was because of religious intolerance. My dad grew up having to fight people he thought were his friends because they made religious slurs. That’s the reason im in Krav Maga in the first place. My dad says that one day when im older and living in a community that isn’t as heavily Jewish, someone’s going to make a comment and I am going to have to fight, just like he did. And I will.

Reality of Racism

In the beginning of the week we started talking about racism and we went into this long conversation about how race is a socially constructed idea, not a biological fact. This didn’t surprise me because I learned it last year in human geography but it’s just a really interesting topic to think about. I mean everyone refers to race as if it’s an inborn characteristic of skin color; it’s just how people think. I means my own mom, when telling me about the Holocaust, said that Hitler was trying to turn a religion into a race. I was twelve at the time and asked what race was. She told me it’s a really complicated thing having to do with ancestry and skin color. I can’t make any generalizations about this because she was taught in the USSR, but it makes sense to me that others might think like this too. Race is a huge part of our culture; it has to be if a word such as racism exists. Racism is almost always perceived as one skin color against another, most associate racism with the civil rights movement. It’s just natural to think of race in this way, but what strikes me is that it’s natural to think of race at all. Who cares what color or ethnicity or whatever someone is? I feel like it’s just another in the mundane category of ways humans try to put themselves into smaller and smaller groups. Everyone wants to feel like they’re a part of something bigger, so why not make their category even larger by adding more to it. Race, age, gender, religion...etc...Kind of never ending isn’t it?

Just a game?

So this week we played monopoly in class, as a child I used to love that game. I thought it was all about making money and bankrupting others, only part of that still holds true. The version we played was meant to simulate real life social classes and we were trying to either stat where we were at or climb up in social class. I was in the lower upper class and it was pretty easy for me to stay where I was because I already had a lot of money and property. But the people below me kept on losing money and it was insanely difficult for them to stay out of bankruptcy. I never really thought about this in real life. I knew there were social classes, of course, and that some people had more money then others. But I didn’t think about how hard people try to maintain where they are. I mean we lose money everyday on simple stuff like food and clothes, but then again it’s not always the simple stuff. People like luxury, even in food and clothes. So if you have money you constantly lose it to health and label concerns. With all of this going on it’s not a wonder people try so hard to stay where they are at. My family went from having nothing in Ukraine, to being middle, middle class here. I’ve realized my whole life how hard my parents try but we're still like everyone else. We spend money on things and it’s a wonder we still are where we are. I want new things, so does my brother and so do my parents, thankfully we have the money to buy them. But if we keep buying them will we always have the money? If life is a big monopoly game, then as I have noticed most of the time the rich stay afloat and the rest sink below them.