PBS "New Americans" blog

         In this particular reading, the “New Americans” are Arab people. The main person it is focused on is a determined woman named Naima. It also follows her brothers and husband Hatem. They are all Palestinian and come from a town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Naima is the focus of the article and she wants to come to America to break away from her conservative ways and struggles. She has to deal with taking three taxis and crossing a checkpoint everyday just to get to her university. Her experiences are horrible, ranging from bombing to poverty and she just seeks to get away from it all. Naima wants to expand her horizons and experience the wonder of America for new opportunities. Naima mostly fears that she won’t be able to get what she wants out of life in her current area and has to overcome challenges such as having enough money and going to school. Once Naima did get to America to be with her husband, she truly understood what it was. Originally, she perceived America as being some holy land that will instantly get you a job and make you happy. When she got here, she realized that her English is weak and it is very hard finding a job. She also realized that it is very boring here because everything is so unfamiliar and there’s no family for her. Even her mother leaves as a result of boredom. America is not an easy place to live and unfortunately, Naima learned it the hard way.
            I respect people like them very much. Naima pretty much dropped everything she had and went to America with barely any knowledge of it. People who migrate here deserve respect for coming to a place with so many unknowns. More importantly, it’s the people who do the migrating and become very successful that deserve the most respect. It’s one thing to come here to live, but it’s another to come here and become successful. A lot of people here don’t even become successful. All in all, I think highly of them and they have my respect. 

Five Faces of Oppression

According to Iris Marion Young who wrote the “Five Face of Oppression,” the five faces are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. These five faces of oppression have a very strong connotation of conquest and domination. Young tries to explain these five and how we face them in our everyday lives. Young does this by breaking each one down and pointing out their issues and injustices and identifies what it is to be oppressed and how. Exploitation is when something is put on display or seen a certain way, marginalization is how we are and what sets us apart, powerlessness means having no control, cultural imperialism is when a culture or country is dominated by another culture or country by law, and violence is just destruction and physicality.
            I particularly identify myself with exploitation. I have held this face of oppression almost all of my life. My secrets, desires, life, and needs have all been exploited throughout my life. I believe this oppression is something that everyone has experienced in their lifetime. It is very hard to go through life without something of yours being exploited. It can be as little as letting people know how much you make, to something very big like letting people know your sexual orientation. It makes me feel very powerless to stop it because usually you can’t control what other people exploit. That can later lead to violence which can lead to marginalization and then it’s just this big cycle of constantly changing faces of oppression. It is hard to overcome an oppression such as exploitation because once something is exploited, it’s there for the whole world to see. I believe that in order to conquer it, you have to deal with the hardships that come with it. Nothing is easy in this world and everything comes with a price. Therefore, to conquer this oppression, be vigilant, wary, and smart.

“The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’” Response

                As originally presumed from the title itself, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’” immediately came off as a very original and analyzed piece of work. Beverly Daniel Tatum does a good job in expressing her opinions and stating the facts, emphasizing on the point that we do not necessarily make who we are, but the perceptions of others do; it’s almost as if the perceptions take the form of some enigma and inhabit the seat of your own perception, thus throwing the original off on a tangent. This is the sole envelopment surrounding the question “Who am I” posed in this essay. Simply put, we are who we are, but we are truly what others make us to be. Many people that I know, including myself, would fall into this subordinate group mentioned which includes many minor groups and ethnicities such as homosexuals and Jews. Because they fall into this subordinate category, the category itself makes them who they are because that is what everyone else sees them as. It is not easy to change a labeled image, such as those mentioned, which is why many people find discomfort with falling into some category they were never asked to be placed in. I myself fall into one of these subordinate groups and I am only looked at for what the norm is pertaining to that specific group. No matter how hard I try, unless everyone magically becomes my good friend, I will never truly change how people view me and therefore that perception is labeled on me and stuck there, but the real me is just stuck inside, waiting to come out.
                In addition, this closely ties in with something mentioned in Tatum’s essay called the ‘looking glass self.’ She mentions that “people are the mirror in which we see ourselves” and that is very true (Tatum 9). Through the eyes of others we get a clear, vivid image of what exactly we are portraying ourselves as. I could be wearing a shirt that is just above my belly button, has no sleeves, and says “drop it like it’s hot” and think it’s pretty cool, but of course, many others may not. Once I know that no one has the same perception of this shirt that I originally had, my own perception of it changes because I now see it as a shirt labeled “outcast.” From this example we can see that we see ourselves truly for who we are through others because although many people may say they don’t care what other people think, somewhere deep down they do, which is why many people follow specific trends and styles. We cannot see who we truly are through ourselves because we perceive everything that we do to be normal, until of course someone else has a contradicting perception that makes us want to feel normal—a very subjective word in itself.
                In continuation, something called social context has a lot to do with how we view ourselves. This “social context” refers to things such as circumstances of living conditions, surrounding languages, such as Spanish, and the people with whom you live around.  Although we may not exactly be able to change how others perceive us, we still have our own special identity that we believe in. This special identity allows us to make up our own special answer to “Who am I?” Let’s say a dominate group, such as whites, were to answer the question “Who am I?” for a subordinate group such as homosexuals. As opposed to trying to be insightful to their struggles and feelings, the dominate group would most likely talk about their flamboyant gestures and feminine accents. To stray away from perceiving yourself with the norm of your specific subordinate group, it is vital to understand your social context. The way you were raised, how you may have dealt with only knowing spanish, and what type of area you grew up in are all prime examples that set you apart from the rest. Not everyone’s social context is the same and we can use this to identify ourselves specifically—as opposed to the broad generalizations that the subordinate groups are subjected to. Tatum is basically referring to the experiences that makes us perceive things the way we do instead of perceiving things exactly how others do. If everyone experienced their own life exactly the same, their perceptions would be exactly the same, but because everyone has different experiences, everyone has different perceptions.