High School Never Ends

Elizabeth Martinez makes the statement that whiteness could not exist without blackness and I completely agree. Everybody is envious of everyone else, and has to find a way to make themselves look better by putting somebody else down. I find racism to be somewhat parallel to caddy, high school girls.
Naturally, we do not understand why other people live or act the way they do. We all have our own way of living and doing things that we believe is right. Due to this fact, we find other people to be weird or different which throws up a defensive wall that makes us think we are better than everyone else. When we throw up this wall it makes us think irrationally, and start making up stories in our heads to reassure ourselves that our way of living is the way things are supposed to be. When high school girls fight over a boy, they become obsessed with cutting their opponent down to make themselves seem worthy to the boy of choice. The girls spend all of their time thinking of ways to belittle their competition, and not really focusing on the subject at hand, the guy. I think racism is the same way. People become obsessed with putting down their competition, just to build themselves up.
Name calling is probably where it all starts. The high school girls tell their friends that their competition is a “slut” and everything escalates from there. As the stories get passed from one person to the next the names become worse and worse until the competition seems like the scum of the earth. With racism, the escalation starts the exact same way. Someone comes up with a name for the group they are opposing, and before they know it they have convinced themselves that the group of people is worthless and disgusting. As the opposition continues, the names turn into cat fights, and cat fights turn into groups of friends battling other groups of friends. People do not like to be alone. We like others to have the same opinions we do because it gives us security in our thoughts. Racist individuals find others to share their thoughts with, and in no time the world is in one big cat fight. The funny thing is, many people in the groups do not even know how the argument started in the first place. When the high school cliques decide they hate each other and the other group is not worth associating with, I wonder how many people in the cliques know that they hate each other just because months ago, two girls liked the same boy. We live our lives convinced that we are the “right” group, and become brainwashed that we are better than people in other groups.
People say that all the drama is just caddy high school girls. However, I believe that high school never ends. We will always talk behind each others’ backs, we will compete for jobs like we competed for spots of the basketball team, and we will always compare ourselves to the geeks, weirdoes, Goths, blacks, and jocks. Maybe we all just need to grow up.

Getting Alittle Heated

I find myself getting very defensive when I am reading the passage about Language and Silence. Getting defensive is something that is almost foreign to me because I am one of those people who avoids discussions or arguments about “the tough stuff” at all costs. I was reading along, agreeing with some of the things the author stated, then the next thing I know, I want to throw my book down and give up. All those times of quietly dodging the bullet of these subjects is back to bite me in the butt.
I am very traditional in my beliefs about gender roles. The article talks about a gendered world where we cannot have a conversation about an individual without knowing his or her gender. I personally do not see a problem with this. It is an obvious fact that man and woman were created differently, so what is the problem with distinguishing them? Reading this reminded me of the second article that talked about a woman’s dependency on man. The writings made it seems like it was such a horrible thing to be a woman and have generalizations made about us that we are so dependent on man. I cannot figure out why this is portrayed as being so horrible. I realize that women can function without men in our lives and be just as successful; however we still have feelings and emotions. As I was reading the article I began to feel guilty for enjoying being dependant on a man. I do not find that being dependent makes me deprived of my own life, but I find it to be something that is fulfilling on the inside. The article continues and discusses the gender power system. It seemed to talk down to the titles given to male and female that label them unequal. The book used the examples; king and queen, and man and wife. The book says that no matter what the male has the power head. I like to think of it not as an inequality between male and female, but that the two genders complement each other.
As I continued reading, I found myself being confused by the use term privilege. It seemed the author used it in a negative term that just allows certain people to look down on others. She did say that there really are no privileged or unprivileged people, because everybody is privileged in some ways and not in others. If this is the case, then why can we not look past the who is better than who, and just be appreciative of the blessings that have been bestowed upon our own lives?
Like I said, I usually avoid the topics of race, sex, and inequality. I believe this is mainly because I have never been submerged in a situation to get comfortable with these things. Just because I have grown up in a predominantly “white” lifestyle, does not mean that I do not have friends of different races. I have never felt so “white” in my entire life until I read the last few paragraphs of Wildman’s writings. She made me feel guilty for who I am, when on a regular basis I do not cognitively separate myself from others as she does in the passage. Yes, some of the things she said are true about our “pretty white lives”. I believe I function in this world because I do not dwell on those ideas daily. Naturally, sometimes I notice the separation, however if we all dwelled on the head count of white and colored in every moment of our lives, the world would be more dysfunctional than it already seems to be.
I contribute my defensive feelings to the sheltered life I have had thus far. Disagreeing with people (or authors) is something I am just not comfortable with. I am a people pleaser; therefore this is really hard for me. I would say it is probably about time I start standing up for myself.

Be Careful Little Eyes What You Read

Sometimes I feel as if people try too hard to find themselves. Worried too much about what others think of us; we develop this warped picture of ourselves that is not really who we were meant to be. I feel that we are pressured too early to figure out what the rest of our lives must turn out to be. Through adolescence people are experimenting with lifestyles, rebelling their pasts, and changing thought processes daily. With all the emotions that go along with being an adolescent, honestly finding ourselves is almost a joke. Think of the number of people who change their majors more than once throughout their college career. If changing our majors was not an option, there would be a lot of unhappy people in the world. So, if we are gradually allowed to figure out what we want to be, then what is the rush in finding out whom? Personally, if I continued the with the life I chose for myself in high school, my future would be as follows: married to a man who thinks I am worthless, and working long hours as a sports trainer, and be gone most nights of the week and weekend. Needless to say, I would be missing out of love, and an occupation I am excited and passionate about.
I believe that life changes as we live it, and personally I find it usually changes for the better. So why do our choices as adolescents have to be what we live with for the rest of our lives? I think we need to grow into ourselves instead of growing into a lifestyle that we think is best for us. I think growing into ourselves would make people more comfortable and confident in their own skin. Is that not what we are all striving for anyway? Logically, I know that it is not that easy. When the world fights back and tries to tell us who we should be, it spins us in a whirl wind. The stereotypes and generalities that are predetermined by society make it hard for us to “just be ourselves”. The noticeably dominant and subordinate groups want to classify some people as better than others. Now, do not get me wrong, I believe that we were all created equally, however if the domination of some groups is so great, I begin to wonder if maybe thats the way things were meant to be. On page twelve of the text, the authors suggest that dominate grounds do not really know what the subordinate groups experience. I agree with the authors in some cases, but what is the percentage of people who are dominant in every aspect of their lives? I feel that even if it is not noticeable to the passer by, everyone knows what it is like to feel inferior to someone else. I feel as if some things that are deemed dominate to society, can put people in subordinate situations. The more and more I think about it, the stereotypes cannot be the deciding factor of who we are. I believe that how we live out our lives within those generalized categories is who we are; the stereotype itself does not determine that for us.
I am a Caucasian, twenty-something, upper middle class, protestant individual. According to the stereotypes, my dominance is high and life should be good. So if that is what the world sees me as whom I am. Who am I? As a college student who has never been drunk, loves Jesus, and have excessively traditional values about every aspect of life, I feel pretty subordinate.