Disability Discrimination

Ok, as you all know this is the last blog! Aren’t you guys excited? I am the semester is almost over! Last week we discussed social justice issues by reading Social Death by Lisa Cacho and “Biopower, Reproduction, and the Migrant Women’s Body written by Jonathan Inda. We also went to a workshop hosted by Eli Clare about the struggles of disable individuals. On this blog I would like to reflect on how stereotypes and discrimination is the root to social death. Prime example of how language can be defensive as well as stereotyping and discriminating was in Cacho chapter three that stated “Although Bush intended for the audience to equate “evildoers” with terrorists,” he did so with descriptors that could easily refer to gang members (‘people who strike and hide”), undocumented immigrants (‘people who know no border”), the disabled or mentally ill (“people who depend upon others”), and their allies (‘people who harbor them and finance them and feed them.”) (pg. 97, Cacho).

In this blog I would like to reflect more on Eli presentation because it was very interesting and relatively related to this weeks reading with social justice. If you missed Eli presentation I will summarize it briefly. Eli presentation discussed some cons of what disable individuals face around our campus and ways of bringing disability awareness and politics into work on-campus. The speaker spoke on identifying stereotypes of disability, better understanding of the medical/ social model of disability and how disability is a social justice issue. As the speaker spoke on stereotypes it made me think about what we have been learning this week on social death. Disable individuals suffer from negative stereotypes such as low-class, helpless, the belief of having a disability effecting your cognitive behavior, and how many people treat disabled individuals as if they had a disease so they do not want to touch them. All of these examples are examples of discrimination just like the immigration/civil issues or the discrimination towards others for not having “white privilege”.

Eli also talked about non-disable individual’s vocabulary and how it can grow to be very defensive. Lame, spaz, crazy, retard, pyscho, and other words are most commonly used in everyday life conversations that are defensive to people that are disabled. Another interesting stereotype many believe to have logic to is that children that are disable “deserve it” because their parents were unethical and this is punishment for them, which is really a horrible logic. Many disable individuals would like to be treated like everyone else but because of them having a disability many think they are all not capable of doing everyday things. During the presentation a disable woman expressed her fears of her drivers license or gun permit rights being taken away because of the stereotype of “not being able to handle it.”

Lastly, below I found a YouTube video that deals with discrimination. Throughout this class we have discussed discrimination from every aspect (race, gender, and class) but never from a person that is disabled standpoint. I chose this video because it helped me along with Eli presentation to be more aware of what people with disability go through. I hope you guys find this video interesting too, let me know what you think.

http://youtu.be/8fGz2vjj9No

Misconceptions of people

             This week we watched the film Babel and read part of the book Social Death by Lisa Cacho. The film Babel has a much deeper meaning than the plot that is trying to convey.  The meaning behind the films name is the story of Babel in Genesis recounting a man's effort to become equal with God and build a tower that reached to the heavens. So God angry at man's arrogance, confounded man's communication with different languages. This film however suggests that it is not that the barrier of languages that creates problem it is the barrier of not listening to one another. Each story line has characters that are behaving well in a sense however are given obstacles by the misconceptions that others have towards a race. Let us consider the Moroccan boy who was overcome by a higher power (the rifle) and in a game with his brother he accidentally shoots and american tourist and the act is AUTOMATICALLY seen as a terrorist act because of the culture, if it had been in another country like France per-say terrorism would more than likely would have never been brought up. Then there is Amelia who nannies the children of the women who was shot. Amelia wanting to attend he sons wedding is left with no option but to take the children with her because of the incident that has happened with the mother. On the way back home from Mexico, crossing the border she is questioned heavily and again AUTOMATICALLY seen as doing something wrong because of her race and the fact that she has two white children with her. No matter how much we wish this wasn't true our world is divided by race, language, culture and tradition leading to stereotypes among everyone. Stereotypes are degrading because they link race to other categories of devaluation (Cacho 3). This film however is able to bring everyone together despite their culture, the country they are from, religion, age, social class and ties them together with their inability to express themselves. The film made the audience view this characters as people not as Moroccans, Mexicans, or Americans because we all sympathized them and wanted to somehow help. The term Racial Realism that Cacho speaks of in Social Death is moving and how we begin battles we have already lost, that we acknowledge and accept that everything we do may not ever result in social change (32). Pertains to these characters in Babel because no matter how hard they try to get their message across if does not matter because they have basically already lost according to society due to the stereotypes that come along with their race and nothing can change that. All it takes is to listen which results in understanding and a deeper connection.

                  Just a picture i thought was moving and had lots of meaning that ties in with the power of communicating. What does this picture mean to you and how does it tie in with Babel?

"To Black To Be Latino" in the US and Brazil

Hello everyone!!!

For my blog post I would like to reflect on Hernandez's piece "Too Black to be Latino." I always knew there was a difference between the perception of a mestiza latino and a Afro-Latino, but Sra. Hernandez really summed up a great explanation into why the latinos think this way. She states that the Afro-Latinos are visually viewed  as Anlgo-Blacks so they are not "authentic" Latinos (153). This is very hard for me to accept because how can your own people just discredit your nationality because of your skin color? This problem is happening in many countries with black people like the United States, claiming African-Americans as being "un-American," but back to the Latinos. This mindset of seeing the Afro-Latinos as "foreign" and being less than a mestiza stems from colonialism. Since the European nations projected their ideologies of black being inferior and white being superior, anyone that achieves whiteness or is closer to whiteness than blackness is seen to be as better. So in the case of a mestiza, they are a hybrid mix of European, indigonous, and black, so they are not fully black so thier achievement of whiteness is greater. This mindset does not just affect the Afro-Latinos in spanish speaking countries, it happens in many other countries like the Unites States and Brazil.

In my hometown, we have a big population of Latinos, but we have a smaller population of Afro-Latinos, so when one comes along, the Latino community treats them differently.  Back when I was in middle school, a new girl came to my school and she was of Jamaican and Colombian decent, her mother was Jamaican and her father was Afro-Colombian. Although she embraced both of her nationalities, she openly represented being Jamaican more than being Colombian because people accepted her blackness as a Jamiacan more than a Colombian. I remember one day in spanish class she told the class she was Colombian and everybody didn't beleive her. Everyone just discredited her nationality because of the color of her skin, and the crazy thing about it was that it wasn't just the Latinos shunning her nationality, it was the black, white, and Asian students who also discredited where her family comes from. When she tried to make friends with the latinos in my school, all of the shunned her and claimed that she was lying and she was just trying to be like them. This story goes back to Hernandez's story because she was seen as "foreign" to the Latinos and even though she is Colombian, she is still seen as less than or "trying to be mestiza" because the color of her skin.

In Brazil, there are many colorism issues in Brazil. In Brazil there are more than 100 ways to describe the color of their skin and the whiter it is the better. Attached is a video that was a part of a series broadcasted on PBS. "Black in Brazil" breaks down the racial issues in Brazil even though they claim their society is a racial democracy, meaning that racial issues do not exist because everyone comes from the same lineage of ancestry. I know its really long but the parts I would like you all to watch and reflect on is the first 5 minutes and from 26 minutes to 28. Hope you all enjoy.