The Influence of Media

For the majority of her life, Pauline in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is heavily influenced by the media. Pauline creates many narratives to portray her life, but the problem with her narratives is that the meanings she derives from them negatively impact her. All of her pain and suffering could have been avoided if she just realized that Cholly would never be the "Stranger" from her stories.  Even her experience with with Fishers causes harm, and not only to herself.  By regarding her own experiences as more meaningful then with her own family, Pauline also hurts her children.  This is the reason why Pecola and her brother don't receive any love from Pauline, making their relationship very brittle. In fact, this is probably why Pecola calls her mother Mrs Breedlove.

Perhaps the most damaging is her addiction to movies. By watching movies, she begins to "regard love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit" (Morrison 122).  She comes to believe that love is no loner about "lust and caring for" but rather possession and beauty.  The narrator even describes love and beauty to be the "most destructive ideas in the history of human thought"(Morrison 122).  After watching the movies for some time, Pauline begins to rank people on a scale of beauty. She goes from disregarding physical beauty to embracing it, which shows how much the media has affected her.

Meringue Pie

When I first saw the nickname Claudia and Frieda came up with for Maureen Peal, I wondered, "Is there another reason for the nickname other than the similarities between the spelling?"  Sure enough, after searching it up on Google images, I came across a small, white, and cute picture of the pie:

Does this description ring a bell? Well it should, because that is exactly how Toni Morrison portrays Maureen Peal in The Bluest Eye.  Maureen Peel is described in the book as a "disrupter of seasons", and "a high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back"(62).  This passage suggests the oppression of blacks, as supported by Maureen's skin color and social status. Also, the "two lynch ropes" also stimulate racial oppression. Even though Maureen is portrayed as a "dream" child, the connotation of her descriptions hold the darker meaning of what her family really is.  Her introduction hints that her family's success is directly related to the oppression of the poor and colored.

No matter how hard Claudia and Frieda try to "restore their equilibrium", their attempts at classifying Maureen as someone equal to them will never work.  This is simply because of their differences in color and class status.  Everyone else looks at Maureen as a perfect role model, and nothing can be done to change that.  

I'm kinda hungry now, I guess this is the burden Shankar has to endure while writing his blog posts :P

Puzzle Paragraph Two

While others may say that they aren't influenced by society's standards, the truth us that they really are in some way, shape, or form.  In Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye,  she references a distant conversation she had with a girl named Pecola.  In this conversation, Pecola expresses her longing for blue eyes.  However, Toni doesn't think that Pecola should have blue eyes and tries to make it seem like she isn't profiling. Toni believes that Pecola shouldn't be a lone ranger and accept her looks as who she is.

From this forward, I can tell that beauty and color are going to be two main themes throughout this book. If Pecola keeps trying to change herself based on society expectations, then she will dig herself into a pit of hopelessness.  This pit is sort of like a casino; once someone starts gambling then it becomes impossible to stop.  I expect Pecola's path to be similar to a fire, consisting of destruction and suffering  Although this book isn't a memoir, it will still have the same effect as one.  I am sure verisimilitude will be used throughout this book as the characters fight a battle against society's norms.

What Race Are We?

Today, race is more of an explanation for cultural differences between different populations of people. Despite all of us being genetically similar, why are we all classified into races?  Is race even a legitimate way of classifying people? After all, we were the ones who set the boundaries.

What makes everyone different are environmental factors such as geography and culture.  After living in a place for quite some time, people begin to have specific changes to adapt to that area. In fact, race was used to categorize people based on different locations.  Based off of where someone was from, he/she would be placed in that race.

Now comes the problem with genetics deciding race.  This isn't possible, since everyone is genetically the same.  Just because black people can get sickle cell and whites can't doesn't mean they can be put into different categories.  People can have different skin color, eye color, hair texture, nose length, and others but these simple differences aren't enough to put everyone into separate sections.

The fact is, everyone is becoming more and more similar.  With immigration, more people have never been to their ancestor's countries or have known their culture and heritage. Despite my parents growing up in China, I don't know a whole lot Chinese culture.  But this difference doesn't separate us; we are still the same family and value the same things.  So what race does this make me?  I believe the answer to that is the "Human" race.

The Guilt of Survival

The second part of Maus deeply depicts Vladek's influences from the war.  After surviving, he gains many habits, such as hoarding and preserving everything. His conservative nature leads to many arguments between him and his son, Artie.  Now, with his father gone, Artie realizes that depicting Auschwitz is a near-impossible task. He feels hopelessness and frustration because he knows that anything he accomplishes will never be as much of an accomplishment as surviving Auschwitz.  This situation also causes a type of guilt felt by Artie.  He experiences this guilt because he didn't have to go through Auschwitz and isn't able to connect with his father experiences and trauma.  His therapist then says that maybe Vladek acts the way he does because he also experiences guilt.  Different to Artie's guilt, Vladek may feel a survivor's guilt.  On an individual level, many Holocaust survivors have to cope with this guilt, the guilt that they survived the camps yet many others didn't.  All of this guilt talk leads to Artie declaring a bigger guilt. He says that the blame of the Holocaust extents beyond the Germans, and that everyone should always feel it.  This raises the question of who really was responsible for the Holocaust? Could something have been done to destroy the concentration camps?  What could the communities in Germany have done to help the Jews? Could the Allies have gone faster?  

Whoever is responsible for the Holocaust can be debated, but whether it's the result of an army or one man, raising this question shows how wrong and terrifying those times were.

Our Default Settings

While reading David Wallace's "This is Water" story, I came across the unfamiliar term of "default setting".  Yet even though I had never heard this term before, upon reading the piece I realized that I also had this "setting".  I realize that I often view myself as the main character in this world.  Have I always been self-centered?

An important idea to come out of Wallace's "This is Water" is that everyone subconsciously believes that he or she is the "absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence" (233).  For example, let's say I am playing a video game, and I get paired up with another person who isn't as good.  I would feel quite frustrated because this is my natural way of thinking. I wouldn't think that maybe my teammate is new to this game, or that he/she just doesn't care about it as much as I do.  I realize that because of this, the world really is a selfish egocentric world. After all, life mainly is about living life to the fullest, which usually doesn't count others lives.  

I believe that if everyone looks at other people's perspectives instead of their own then the world would be a better place.  Homelessness might not even be a thing if this was the case.  The only problem is that there is no switch, and it doesn't happen on its own. Thinking like this requires a conscious effort in order to "stay conscious and alive, day in or day out" (238). People have to understand that self-centered thinking makes them slip away from reality.

Does America Love Us Back?

"That's when I realized that yeah we're different, but we're different in a little bit different way than we thought."   Spoken by Amer Zahr at a 2015 TEDxDetroit talk, he really points out the problem nowadays with racial profiling.  If everyone is created "equal", then why does racial profiling still exist?

Him recalling the young boy with a clock getting arrested reminded me of the Ferguson shooting.  The two stories are very similar.  The boy with the clock got arrested simply because he was an Muslim. That being the only reason is ridiculous. If it were some other white boy then no suspicions would have been raised, I'm sure of it.  Just like with the Ferguson incident, the officer wouldn't have threatened to shoot so soon had the offender have been another race.  Also, in Ferguson, 97% of people arrested are African American, whereas the cities population is only 67% black (BBC News). Racial bias much? I'm sure Irving and Ferguson aren't the only cities with racial profiling either, and judging from these two incidents, some major changes definitely have to happen with many police forces.

Yes, I get that after incidents such as 9/11 and the Paris hostage situation, racial tensions would rise.  But just because a small group of Muslims caused a tragedy, doesn't mean everyone should start profiling all Muslims as terrorists.  Basically, someone shouldn't be judged based on the way he/she looks. Not all men are rapists, just most rapists are men.