Thanksgiving, Black kids in the Cafeteria, Censoring Myself and others...

One thing that I noticed in the Thanksgiving comic strip was the fact that the little white boy's shirt kept changing in each box but the little Indian girl's attire stayed the same the whole time. I like how they showed how naiive he was and how he believed everything that have been washed into his brain but at the end, being the superior white male he disregards everything he just heard and just tried to build himself up by remarking that his father could beat her father up in a fight.
I went to a predominantly black school so the black kids all sitting at the same table was inevitable but most of the Asian kids sat together and the Hispanics too. Since there weren't many Asians or Hispanics they sat with the Black kids too. Why is it that Black kids are the main focus as if other race and ethnicity groups including whites don't have identity problems? In my High School there was two Cambodian sisters, each in a grade above me. In our culture when someone we really care about pass away we shave our head in mourning regardless of if you were a man or a woman. Their brother passed away and they came to school with shaved heads and everyone made jokes like "oh look they just pulled a Britney Spears stunt." People then proceeded to ask me if my mother died, which I didn't think was a joking matter, would I shave my head!
I wasn't mad though, they come from different backgrounds where cutting off all their hair seemed absurd, instead of running to my Asian companions and keeping my fellow classmates ignorant I explained to them that its your choice and you didnt have to you didn't want. The point I'm trying to get at is when the teacher used the term "you people" to the little girl, YES she had a right to be mad but when she told her white friend and didn't recieve the response that she wanted she should not have shyed away from the situation. She should have taken the chance to educate her white friend because different people grow up with different experiences and they will never understand you the way that you want them to unless you explain it to them. Its like if I would have just kept to my Asian friends because they grew up like me and understood me, then I would have admitted defeat, in letting them believe what they had only assume I would have kept MYSELF in a little box.
I do know how the little black girl felt though, we had a science teacher; he was a fill-in and I admit that I was in a pretty bad class. The boys were always so rowdy and he would tell us to sit down but people would just walk around and he would always say things like "you people don't listen" or "it's just like you people to be actin like that". I knew he was never talking to me because I was an exception to the class, it's so weird being the little quiet Asian girl who always listened; thats so stereotypical, but anyways in grouping us together as a whole I always felt a little sting when he said things like that. My whole grade got together, signed a petition, and got him fired. I say in situations like these you either take take action or you take action_you either educate or you do something about it but you don't let an ignorant mind stay closed, you have an obligation to open up people's mind so that they don't go out and treat others the way that they treat you.

Race, Ethnicity and Stereotypes too...

Today I am not a person who judge someone based on their skin color. I like to say that I am color blind when it comes to things like that but from age 1-9, before I moved to Philadelphia I lived in Long Beach, California and I was surrounded by a majority of Cambodian people like me. There were a few African Americans and a few more Hispanics. So as you can imagine I didn’t come from a very diverse environment so when I first moved to Philadelphia I had some trouble making friends because there wasn’t much people like me and I really strayed from them. I went through a few years without having any friends until I learned to accept that color wasn’t really important. When I first went to boarding school there were a few people like me but the majority was African Americans but that didn’t make a difference for me. Most of them tried to stick to their own kind but I was friends with everyone, sometimes jokingly they would ask me if I was color blind and I would just simply say “yes.” As the years passed by the other Asians in my grade either got kicked out or they just left school and through my junior and senior year I was the only Asian person in my grade but I was cool with everyone_ white, black, Hispanic, or other. They called me the token Asian but I fit right in.

For me I can say that I don’t judge people by their skin color or the way they carry themselves. I like to look at personality but I know that I get judged by people every single day by the way I dress and the way I talk or don’t talk. I know that because I dress in baggy jeans and clothes that people think I’m a very sloppy person that don’t care about anything and because I don’t like to talk about a lot of thing s that I am a boring person but everyone who has ever given me a chance know that I am one of the most organized and neat person the world has and that I don’t let a lot of things bother me but when I am passionate about something I fight for my stand and when I’m just hanging out I don’t leave without getting a laugh from everyone.

Another thing is people think that just because I am Asian I have to be super smart in math and science but in fact I am only average and at times I struggle just like everyone else so stereotypes are never true for all.

Black Bart, MTV and others...

I dont think I really agree with Gerbner even though he has those surveys as proof it just makes me wonder who exactly is he surveying. Is there a variety or just one group like the survey where the question ask "Is it okay for whites to keep blacks out of their neigborhood?," Seriously are they just asking whites and if they are, it's okay for that specific question because it is geared towards seeing what the whites are thinking about that topic specifically. But what kind of whites are we talking here, a bunch of racist if you ask me. Why would anyone not see a problem with doing that? Heck, the majority of serial killers are white males, I think that people should understand in this day and age that there are voilent and defective people in all race and ethnicity and it would be stupid to base your judgements on sterotypes or television shows. I do watch my fair share of reality tv shows and MTV and all those shows that serves no pupose but to entertain people and I don't think that it really clouds my judgement on anything. I don't believe that a woman's job is to clean the house or stay at home with the kids. A woman should have every right to go out and get the bacon just as much as the guy does_I personally love to work for every penny I spend and I do watch a lot of those reality tv shows that Gerbner is saying gives people like me a negative visual of what the real world is like. I watch tv but I know what the real world is. I'm not going to be surprised if I saw a mother keeping her family together by working nonstop and I'm not going to expect that I can ask for a glass of warm milk and cookies from everyone's grandmother. It is what it is_I watch tv for entertainment not for guidance.
The Simpsons is actually one of the first cartoon I ever remember watching as a kid. Till this day I don't really know what race the characters in the Simpsons are supposed to be because they are clearly yellow and yellow is usually associated with the asian race and I'm pretty sure they are not supposed to be asians. It's like they are white but arguably though. It's weird how they make the supposedly white people yellow but the black characters are easily identified. But anyways I don't even see what the big deal was when they turned Bart into a black charater.
First off I just want to say that "Next" was probably one of my favorite on MTV. As ridiculously fake and stupid as it was, I found it quite entertaining. Again I disagree that any show such as Next gives people a false perspective of reality because when we are put in the real situation I don't think that anyone would act the way the people on the show would and those who do are probably the very young people that shouldn't be in that kind of situation anyways. On the show next when they have the male as the one who goes out with the five different girls_I know that the male objectify the woman and that is wrong but they also have shows that the girls do the same thing. They used as one example that when a guy was nexted he said that the girl was flat and but its not like when the roles are switched that the girls wouldnt insult the guy too if she was nexted_I just think that its in human nature and its how we cope with rejection. It's not like a guy would really think a girl is a slut if he liked her and he knew that she liked him back. As for the girl who flashed the guy because she got nexted I agree that was stupid and if I was put into that situation I know I would keep my boobs to myself and I hope that people don't actually think thats cool because I have enough sense to watch that and say that was stupid so i do expect others to feel the same way. Just because you watch something doesn't mean you have to let it make your decisions for you, just like you shouldn't believe everything you read. You read something and you use sense to believe what you think is right_you watch something and you use sense to act the way you think is right. One thing that I really found interesting about this essay and it could be just me but everytime I read something that gives you an option between him/her or he/she and so on, they always put the he first. I always noticed this so one time I wrote a paper and I used she/he and when the teacher was editing my paper she told me that I should change it to he/she because it looked and sounded better, of course I didn't agree with her so I didn't change it. She took a point off and said it was because I didnt take her critique into consideration. So I admire the author for using she first.

Socheatha Vorn

My name is Socheatha Vorn. I did not know how my name came to be until my senior year of high school when I was all about learning about myself. Before that people would ask me and I would have just shrugged my shoulders. Some people told me that my name was so unique that even if I didn't know what it meant or where it came from that I should make up a story. At times I would but one time I just asked my mother about it.
Turns out it really didn't mean anything but it was someone else's name before it was mine. She was a woman said to have been the first woman to set foot on Earth which in the American culture she would kind of be the equivalent of Eve.