[Dylan Hutson]

For this week’s topic on lyrical representation of segregation, I chose a segment of a song by Lupe Fiasco called “Hurt Me Soul”.  In this song, he touches on welfare and health care policies, which have all been, in some way, shaped by the institution of racism. He also mentions other outside systemic forces that create a culture of poverty and violence. Breaking it down line by line, he mentions how the “the cops wanna kill me, this nonsense built me”. This is a direct highlight on police brutality in the United States towards black citizens and how this is the life that he has unfortunately been apart of. The next line goes on to state “I got no place to go” which reminded by of the construction of the ghetto that we talked about in class because he was living in Chicago at the time  and not being able to get out of this system of segregation that has been set up. The next line talks about “bombing my village, they call us killers” and I looked into this line and Lupe Fiasco is Muslim so this line is most likely about the West’s view on Islam and how they view all Muslim’s as killers. Next, “took me off they welfare, can’t afford they healthcare” directly speaks on behalf of the racial institutions that have been set up to deprive many individuals of color the right to healthcare in the United States. The last line goes on to talk about “my teachers won’t teach me”  which highlights what we talks about in class how poor urban areas have an educational system that is lacking because of access to education and how some of the teachers do not have the proper tools to provide the education needed for these kids based on government regulation. Overall I thought this song and these lyrics highlighted an array of topics we have talked about in the course of this class and was a prime example of lyrical representation of segregation.

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[Dylan Hutson]

For this week, I wanted to share a story from an article titled ” White Woman Claims to Confronts Racism by Creating Racist Yoga Event; Clearly Doesn’t Understand How Racism Works”. This very recent headline deals with a white woman by the name of Pat Brown who wanted to start a yoga group for only white women, where they can gather and have a sense of community with other white women who enjoy yoga in a comfortable white space. She even named the event “White Women Yoga Meetup”. She claims that she never intended the event to go on and that she was making a statement to bring forth the separatism that is brought forth by these types of meetups. She even tweeted that she was upset that this platform allowed her to be excluded from groups that are specifically labeled as “Black, African American, Mahogany, People of Color, etc.” (directly from her tweet). Her “intentions” were to highlight that there should be no need for these “safe” spaces to congregate and that we should basically be color blind and include everyone. She was clearly missing the point and I think this is a prime example of what we talk about in class with white people needing to poke their noses into anything they feel excluded from because it is a foreign concept to them. My favorite quote from the article in which I found this story is “Why would you want to be part of a group that is neither intended for you nor expressly in opposition to you, but exists solely for the benefit of marginalized people? Is it for the sheer pleasure of disrupting their equilibrium? Is it because you’re afraid we’re organizing? “. I think it highlights perfectly the conversations we have in class regarding this subject and the fragility of spaces and communities that unite together

 

Source: https://theglowup.theroot.com/white-woman-claims-to-confront-racism-by-creating-racis-1832737943

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[Dylan Hutson]

This picture I have chosen is of a map of Yosemite National Park that was illustrated by an artist in the 1940’s. This map shows little animations to highlight sections of the park but what is really the highlight of the map is that the National Park Services uses the indigenous people and their symbols to advertise certain areas of the park despite the fact that they were pushing these people out of their land. Some of the symbols include indigenous people on the point of Eagle Peak and mainly tourists who have now taken the space. Even on Yosemite’s website today, the discussion on indigenous people talks about how they were “disbanded” instead of forcefully removed from their land. They go on to talk about how the natural population was just in decline and how there was an economic shift at the time that lead to the indigenous people to vacate. Knowing this and seeing how the Parks are using the native symbols as representation of the park is very interesting knowing the history and how inappropriate that it without actually caring about the people they removed. It is one thing to acknowledge the land and the people who lived there and it is a completely different thing to try to make a cute animation to attract tourist to a land that is drenched in genocide.

 

Source: This map of the Yosemite Valley illustrated by Jo Mora, circa 1940 from the website “https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/erasing-native-americans-from-national-parks/”

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[Dylan Hutson]

For this weeks topic I wanted to talk the School-To-Prison Pipeline. An Ohio woman by the name of Zakiya Sankara-Jabar recently dealt with this when her preschool son, Amir, was suspended from his pre-K program. The claim for his suspension was that he was having problems focusing on activities and transitioning from one to the next and he was throwing temper tantrums. She states that they made it seem like something as normal as being a preschooler was abnormal and crazy. She went to speak on and advocate against these suspensions and stated “I suddenly realized that I wasn’t a bad parent and my son wasn’t abnormal. This was something larger, more societal, that was happening to African American parents.” I thought this was important based on our discussion in class because the article that I found discusses how the school-to-prison pipeline starts at early as preschool. These suspensions are usually target at black children and they are 3 times as likely to get suspended than white children. When I read this, it genuinely shocked me because these are children at the earliest stages of their schooling and for this process of racially inequitable school discipline policies to already beginning is truly upsetting.

 

 

Sources: https://www.wyso.org/post/wyso-investigation-reveals-thousands-ohio-k-3-students-suspended-each-year

https://prospect.org/article/parents-must-shut-down-school-prison-pipeline

 

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[Dylan Hutson]

The picture I have chose for my photo share is of a charter school on UCSD’s campus called the Preuss School. I wanted to talk about this because I know that many people at our school are unaware that we have a connecting middle and high school directly next to us, sponsored by our university. This school is a middle through high school for children of low income families and these students will be the first in their familial generations to go to college. Their mission statement online states: “The Preuss School UCSD is an intensive middle and high school chartered under the San Diego Unified School District and located on the University of California, San Diego campus in La Jolla. The mission of the Preuss School is to improve educational practices and provide an intensive college preparatory school for low-income student populations, which are historically underrepresented on the campuses of the University of California.” I find this school very related to what we were talking about in class but in a different context. This is not a similar story of white flight from “worse” schools or schools where their student’s feel like they can’t succeed but rather a school that hardly has a white population at all because white folks are not usually part of the group where the parents do not go to college. I find this interesting because this school has a racial and socioeconomic history to it. These children bus an hour to 2 hours a day to get to this school and the application process to even get in is a hefty 23 pages. In order to sent their kids to this school, parents MUST not have gone to college, they must make less than a certain amount depending on how many people are in the household, and their student must possess motivation to go to a 4 year college. In 2017, the school was ranked 54th in the country. As first I thought this school was an amazing idea when I first heard of it and now I am looking more into how it relates to the scope of this class. In the “Do We Still Segregate Students?” article, the article highlights the tactics of detracking, which is when students are not places in groups based on academic achievement but rather all students of all achievement levels are placed together. The Preuss school is mentioned as a success story in this article and is highlighted for is “rigorous curriculum, extra tutoring, and high expectations”. This interested me because these students are all placed together and instead of benefiting the community in which they come from, they are all be bussed all the way to La Jolla to further their education. In US News, the total minority % (they define this as anyone who identifies as non-white) was 99% of their student body. It was very hard to find articles talking about race amongst this school and I think that stems from people thinking this is not about race but rather bettering student’s education and sending them to “better” schools

 

Source: https://psmag.com/education/do-we-still-segregate-students-45196

UCSD’s Preuss School Named 5th Best Public High School in California

Click to access Application-for-Admission-Fall-2013.pdf

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[Dylan Hutson]

This week I chose to look at some political satire on the Black Lives Matter movement that has been happening across the United States. This picture is of a comic strip that is commenting on the idea of white people saying “All Lives Matter” in response to this movement. When I saw this, it initially affected me because of how ignorant that phrase is and this comic pokes fun at that by showing how ridiculous the statement is by comparing the phrase to houses while one is clearly burning down. What really hit me about this picture though is the conversation we has in class about the tactics white folks would use in order to force black folks out of their communities. This reminded me of white folks bombing their black neighbors houses even though the purpose of this comic was far after the time when those tactics were used. This comment was not speaking of the time but the parallel and depth that this comic can hold in terms of the past and what black people had to deal with within their own communities is paralleled by the Black Lives Matter movement. In a similar fashion to the house bombings, black people are further getting harassed within the Black Lives Matter movement by people outside of it who feel like they need to be a part of it, thereby “reclaiming” the movement as their own, which takes away from the movement itself.

 

This comic was posted by http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2014/12/08/all-things-considered/ by Kris Straub on December 8th 2014

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[Dylan Hutson]

For this weeks post I have included two picture showing the racial segregation of Washington D.C. throughout the past couple of decades. The first picture shows the population of Washington D.C. in 1990 and the second picture is from 2016. The blue dots represent blacks, red dots represent whites, green dots represent asians, yellow dots represent hispanics, orange dots represent natives, and purple dots represent others. In the 1990’s, you can see that there were clearly distinctions on where whites and blacks lived, and there were hardly any overlaps. Even still in 2016, areas like Anacostia, Walker Mill, and Hillcrest are predominantly black neighborhoods. This residential segregation can be attributed to practices such as redlining like we talked about in class. These practices still affect neighborhood segregation today and still affect a lot of families from moving out of the areas they currently live in. Almost 30 years later, we will still the affect that these “civilized” practices have.

 

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/segregation-us-cities/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.cf3d37dc708c

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[Dylan Hutson]

The picture I have chosen is an example of voluntourism, which is something that we talked about in class, but I wanted to look through the internet and find some concrete examples of these types of pictures. The plethora of content that I found was honestly astonishing. This specific picture was from a parody show that highlights the reasons why people are actually deciding to take these volunteer vacation trips and talks about the motives that drives these people to partake in these trips. The video is a fake game show essentially saying that this white woman, Lilly, is going to “save Africa” and her voluntourism trip was the first step towards that goal. The question asked in the video was how many countries are in Africa and Lily responds with 1 country, while the correct answer is 54. The host proceeds to tell her she would be a great volunteer, mocking the fact that most people who go and visit these spaces they want to give back to really do not know anything about the culture, the people, the geography or anything really for that matter. This highlights the idea we talked about in class in Lipsitz’s “‘Space’ in Keywords for American Cultural Studies” about open spaces and those that have the privilege to ‘escape’ to far off places as a sort of vacation. This also is an example of the white savior mentality, the idea of white people trying to “help” people of color with that help being perceived as self-serving in ways. The idea of voluntoursim and publicly posting pictures of small children and families in countries that these people know nothing about is a great example of these people’s spaces being disturbed and how race places a role in this disturbance.

 

This source of this image is a screenshot from the parody video “Who wants to be a Volunteer?”, produced by the Norwegian students’ and academics’ international assistance fund (SAIH) and was included in an article by Hannah Reid on ‘The Spinoff’ on April 2018.

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