[Hanaa Moosavi]

This photo illustrates the opening of the George Bush Intercontinental Airport to accommodate the immigrant children that passed into the United States illegally. This picture caught my eye due to the terrible conditions that these immigrants had to undergo while getting processed by the US government. The bathroom is stationed in the same room as the waiting immigrants and there are no chairs to be found. There are over thousands of unprocessed immigrants and they are forced to sleep and sit on the floor while they wait for the processing of their future. Due to the lack of documents or the fact they do not belong to the USA, they are forced to go through terrible conditions and wait in terrible lines. In most cases, these people are seeking refuge and a better future and all the government does is punish them for this want, punish them for wanting a better life. Something important to note as well, many of these people that are waiting and sleeping on the floor are immigrant children; children that have not even owned a home or experienced a job, were forced to sit in a crowded room, with porta potties, and wait for their future to be decided.

 

Source: Admin. “ICE Opens Staging Area at Bush Airport for Undocumented Immigrant Children.” <i>The Venture</i>, 2 July 2014, http://www.theventureonline.com/2014/07/ice-opens-staging-area-at-bush-airport-for-undocumented-immigrant-children/.

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[Hanaa Moosavi]

For this week’s photo share, I will be analyzing a photo from when Trump was looking for the perfect wall for his “build a wall” movement. This photo shows a few different demonstrations of potential walls for the border. While discussing illegality and civil rights for this weeks photo share, we did not forget the injustice suffered by the immigrants that seek refuge to this country and how badly the law actually treats them. The many arguments that are presented against immigrants were, and still are, usually regarding the fact that they are stealing our jobs, abusing our hard earned tax money, and taking all of our resources. As discussed in class, there are many different counters to these arguments, leaving most of them are discredited. This photo demonstrates how the justice system, more specifically the president in this specific situation, works to ‘egg’ on immigrants, and, as of now, there has been nothing done to actually build the wall they have used to bully with. This photo shows that Trump was setting up a demonstration to pick and choose the right materials and look that this wall, a border wall that will effectively keep out any immigrant wanting to enter America illegally, should exude. Not only does it look like Trump is shopping at a home depot, it also gives off the message that the government is ready and willing to put up with wall, and the fact that they haven’t yet gives immigrants the uneasy feeling of never really knowing when they will be detained or shut out. Trump was not there to actually conduct any formal business on the matter of actually building the wall; Trump was there to send a message to the people entering and exiting the country and he sent the message in the worst possible way. This act alone shows how disrespectful the government remains towards the people that believe America as the place for new beginnings.

Source: Fox 17 News, “Trump to sign order sending National Guard to Mexican Border”, April 4, 2018.
Trump to sign order sending National Guard to Mexican border

[Hanaa Moosavi]

This picture depicts a before and after, anti-muslim attack on this woman. After Trump was elected president, over 1,094 incidents of harassment towards black and Muslim Americans has been reported at the time of this article. The surprising fact is that there is someone in office, who has been elected president, that allows for such disgusting hate crimes to take place and ensue. This woman was stepping in to protect another Muslim woman from getting attacked and in turn was nearly beaten to death.
Due to the major lack of intersectionality in the arguments regarding the under represented and harassed ethnicities in the world, a majority of the hate crimes that are directed to Muslim Americans often get covered and pushed away. The fact that there is not more attention brought to this disgusting behavior saddens me greatly. Since 9/11, there has always been contravorsy regarding Muslim relations and America, however, this should not be pushed into a stereotype and a generalization.

Source: Picture is taken from an article posted on the online forum Political Dig. “Trump Supporter Yells ‘You Will Be Shipped Back’ As He Brutally Beats Muslim Woman Unconscious,” by Bruce White, June 5, 2017. https://politicaldig.com/trump-supporter-yells-you-will-be-shipped-back-as-he-brutally-beats-muslim-woman-unconscious/

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Hanaa Moosavi.

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[Hanaa Moosavi]

Above is a photo by Ansel Adams depicting the children of internment camps. Last year, i attended a play by UCI college students about a boy who’s father played baseball in his internment camp when he was a young boy. The play showed that in present time the father had a hard time connecting with his son’s love for baseball because baseball to the father reminded him of his days in the internment camps, and more specifically, his own fathers time in the internment camps. Because the parents of children detained in internment camps wanted them to fee as dehumanized as possible, they would beg cap officials to allowed the children time to play together. when watching this play, the pain of seeing the privileges of playing a simple round of baseball being taken away was too much to bare. The officials were so cruel that they felt that they needed to punish the kids as well.

Source: Open Culture, “Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Francis Stewart’s Censored Photographs of a WW2 Japanese Internment Camp,” August 11, 2017,http://www.openculture.com/2017/08/censored-photographs-of-a-wwii-japanese-internment-camp-by-ansel-adams-dorothea-lange-clem-albers-francis-stewart.html

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[Hanaa Moosavi]

The photo I chose for this weeks photo share is a political cartoon depicting the Los Angeles Unified School District firing a teacher for teaching multicultural curriculum including Malcolm X’s autobiography and Langston Hughes poems. DemocracyNow outlines the events with more detail than the website I found the political cartoon on.
In the transcript of the show, Karen Salazar, the teacher laid off, said that there were many strange occurrences that surrounded her firing from the LAUSD. At first, when she received her evaluation from he school, they had given her a satisfactory scoring. Later on when the district decided not to extend her contract to the next school year, she saw the real evaluation they had given her. She was deemed unsatisfactory and when pressed for the actual reason she was being let go, the school district jumped from explanation to explanation: she had a biased view on the curriculum, she was indoctrinating the students with Afrocentrism, there are too many English teachers at her school, and lastly, she was not teaching to school standards.
The reason this cartoon and topic interested me is, just in the last two years alone, I have been taught using the poems of Langston Hughes and, in our Law and Civil Rights class, the writings and transcripts of Malcolm X. I have learned a great deal from them and refer to them for some of my own writings outside of class. To not have learned from them would have been a real hinderance to my education. And not only is the reason she was fired alarming, but, this happened a little over eight years ago. In the spectrum of how far we have come with our cultural advancements, this is an alarming fact that shows we are not as advanced as we had hoped.

Source (Picture):http://cooljustice.blogspot.com/2008/07/teacher-dumped-for-teaching-about.html
Posted by Andy Thibault on July 09, 2008.
Source (Article):https://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/18/la_school_teacher_fired_for_being
By Rodolfo Acuna on June 18, 2008.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by Hanaa Moosavi.

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[Hanaa Moosavi]

After watching the trailer in today’s lecture, I decided to use a parallel used in the trailer for my weekly photo share. The photos below are two panels of a white man pushing an African American woman and the second one is of a white man pushing an African American man. What is so alarming about these two photos is that they are almost identical, they are short videos in the trailer, and yet they are from two different moments in time. The picture of the man and woman is fairly recent, as observed from the quality of the video and the relativity of the objects and people around them, and the photo of the two men is from at least a few decades in the past, as observed again through the quality and the relativity of the objects around the men. It is unnerving and terrifying that disgusting behavior such as manhandling innocent people off the street has maintained presence despite the effort made to abolish racism and segregation. What saddens me further is that the man pushing the woman in the first photo looks to be a navy or army survivor, someone who has fought for America’s freedom and in turn, has fought for this woman’s freedom. Before the trailer had even finished, I was beyond livid with how unchanged America is as a whole; how much we have stayed the same.

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