During our writing meeting, Olivia and I talked about my goals essay, the positives about it, and things that maybe I could improve. She read my essay one paragraph at a time and said that most of it was actually really well written. Some things that she told me that I could possibly improve was when I talked about wanting to be able to express my creativity. She told me that I could talk about examples of how my classes or extracurricular activities could fulfill that need for creativity, or even talk about the lack of it due to the pandemic. Other than that, she suggested that I explain what cultural citizenship is in more detail to make it easier for the reader if they didn’t know what that meant.
Author: awallingford1 (Page 2 of 3)
After listening to my audio journal entries, I noticed a couple of themes that I discuss in almost all of my videos. One of the most prominent is my struggle with planning things out. It seems that just when I think things are under control, I then have a ton of stuff to do. I often feel and share at least a little bit of stress over almost every entry I do. I also discuss doing a lot of things with my family, since they live close by, so we see each other almost every weekend. Although I know that I should spend some weekends on campus to go to activities and things like that, I also discussed a few times throughout my journals that things are really all that normal. As a result, there aren’t nearly as many activities and events going on, and the things that do happen are pretty restrictive, since all the new pandemic rules need to be followed. I also briefly talk about in some of them the social aspect of how my experience is going. It seems to be much more difficult to form connections with people and make friends, because most classes now only meet once a week, and people aren’t allowed to have more than one person at the dorm at a time. The most social that I am able to be is when I go to the ukulele club meetings, but those only happen every two weeks, so I haven’t been able to really get to know them that well yet. In addition, the first couple of weeks I was prepared, although a little stressed, about getting things done in a timely manner. Even though I am getting better at this, it seems like I don’t ever really catch a break, whether it is a paper due or an assignment coming up. Chemistry is also a subject that I struggle with, and although I can eventually figure it out, it is not really a subject that interests me and as a result, I find it more difficult to get the motivation to actually do the assignments. But overall, I seem to be doing okay adjusting to these new experiences, even though I don’t really have anyone who can say they know what this first year experience is like, because nobody really does.
Bain’s chapter includes a variety of examples to illustrate approaches/responses to failure. Which one(s) come close to your own response(s) in the past? Quote/describe that example or those examples from Bain. Explain the text-to-self connection by illustrating your connection with at least one specific example from your life.
Based on the examples that Bain presented in his writing, I have to say that in the past, my relationship with failure has not been all that great. I had been told pretty much all of my life that I was incredibly smart, and although I appreciated the confidence boost, it ended up making me incredibly nervous to do anything that I knew that I wasn’t the best at. “Her father always emphasized that she could do anything she wanted to do, and her teachers said she was one of the brightest students they had ever encountered.”(Bain 101). This was similar to the experience that I had while growing up, in that my teachers and parents told me that I was so smart, I could do anything. One example of when this affected me is when I was a freshman in high school, it was a time where I could have involved myself in creative things like winterguard or art classes from the beginning. But because I was afraid of getting a failing grade that could hurt my chance to get into college, I didn’t take art that year. Luckily, I decided to take AP Art my senior year, and although my senior year was kind of a mess by the end, I was glad that I had decided to take the class. One of the reasons that I decided to take this class was because I had taken ceramics, since taking an art course was required, and my art teacher said that since I had put so much effort into the pieces that I had been creating in that class, she encouraged me to take AP Art the next year. She always encouraged my effort, even when my projects weren’t the strongest, and it was this kind of encouragement that mattered the most to her. Whether my art project was developed enough to be submitted to the College Board was something that could be fixed with time, but instead, it was my effort in making the pieces that she applauded.
We’re at midterms. How might Bain’s ideas help you put your academic work so far into a context for “success” or making the most of college? You might also bring in Duckworth. Be specific by including textual evidence and details about your term.
I think that by reading Bain’s work, I need to work on putting my college life into perspective. Most of high school my biggest fear was not getting into a good school, or simply not being good enough for one. But now that I am in college, I need to step back and recognize that not failing my entire life is not an option if I want to actually have a fulfilling life. What good does it do to refuse to do something that I have always wanted simply because I am afraid of getting it wrong? Although I say this now, these kinds of habits are hard to break, and I recognize that it will probably take a while before I can psych myself up enough to actually dive into something without a fear of failure. I need to reteach myself the meaning of the word “failure”, and dispel the anxiety that I have been taught around that word in my life. “That attitude seeps into every action and interaction, and students pick up the message.”(Bain 110). I know that in some areas of my education, I could tell from other students as well as myself that the word failure was basically condemning that student to fail again in the future. This kind of attitude scares students into believing that if they fail one class, or even just a couple of tests, that they won’t be able to get far in life once they leave school.
What is Grit, as Duckworth seems to see it? Use at least 2 passages to help you define it.
As Duckworth sees it, grit can be defined as the determination to persevere and keep trying until you succeed. She defines it as having the will to see your goals through, even when you feel like quitting. It is a perspective on life, “where Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint”. This is a really good analogy for incorporating aspects of the concept of grit into your life. When people only live for today or tomorrow, they don’t end up setting goals for the future, and as a result, are unable to make any huge life changes. “We need to measure whether we’ve been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.” Having grit means being willing to fail, but get up anyways and try again.
When have YOU exhibited Grit? When have you NOT exhibited Grit? (These are “text to self” connections!)
A time that I exhibited grit was when I was taking AP Art in high school and starting out, my projects didn’t really have a lot of depth or deeper themes that connected them. So I kept improving on and changing my projects until that theme became clear to me and I could follow a better path to where I wanted to go with my art. It also took me a lot of time to figure out what that path was, since my first projects were kind of vague due to the fact that I wasn’t really even sure what theme wanted to portray through my art. A time when I did not exhibit grit was right after I graduated high school, I was determined to keep up my fluency in French after taking it for about six years. But I haven’t really done all that much to keep this skill, but I still have time to build it up and keep it, since it hasn’t been too long.
Duckworth tells us she doesn’t know how to cultivate Grit. OK. Based on what you find in her talk, in what we’ve read this term, and in your own experiences, how do YOU THINK we might cultivate Grit? Explain with reference to the text, the world, and/or yourself.
I think that based on this, grit could be cultivated by people encouraging students and others to fail. Instill in them that failure is an important step in the learning process, contrary to what many American school systems have taught children. These schools teach students that failure is not an option, but in fact, it can be one of the best outcomes in the long run, because you will walk away from that experience with much more knowledge than what you had before. American schools also seem to teach kids that failing means that you are a failure just in general, when in fact, grit is teaching people that “they’re much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition.”
We soon move to our next important project – Majors Exploration. Take some time to think about which major (or majors) seem interesting to you. Nobody is asking you to choose a major right now! Instead, try to identify one major or several. Write at least 3 sentences explaining why you think each possible major interests you. Is it careers? The questions they might ask? The kinds of work they might involve on in? Something else?
I think that I want to explore the business sustainability major because I have always thought that it would be cool to have a business of my own one day. I like the flexibility that it gives you in that you can make a business in practically anything as long as you are knowledgeable about it and are passionate. Also, I enjoy the aspect of creativity that being able to run your own business can form.
“For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. ‘The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,’ said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. ‘And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals’” (104). How do you think this idea functions to establish race – and not class or wealth – as a key division in the mid-1800s in this country? Draw a relationship between Calhoun’s idea and another part of Coates’ text.
1.) This uses race as the deciding factor as to whether or not a person can be successful in their life. This distinction showed that for white people, regardless of whether they were rich or poor, they could still work hard and get far in life, or be whatever they want to be. They could go wherever they wanted as long as they believed that they could do it. Conversely, if they were black, they were seen as less than, and therefore would never be able to get any farther than where they were presently. This connects to when Coates is explaining to his son through the book that the black race is the “below” on which America was built. “It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country.”(Coates 106).
Freebie I. Help us examine some specific part of Coates’ text by offering a Quotation, providing a 3-4 sentence Comment on it, and asking a Question that flows from the quote and/or comment.
2.) “And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they named us matters more than anything we could actually do.”(Coates 120). I chose this quote because I think in saying this, it shows a kind of enlightenment that he has reached through all of these years of research and questioning. At first, he believed that race was what had caused the divide between people. But now he believes that the act of naming others based on skin color automatically is the thing that serves to divide people, rather than skin color itself. Although people have attached stereotypes to each of these categories, and have had a negative result, would it have even been possible to not label people? These descriptors are what people use to describe others, but would these descriptions be considered wrong to use if people decided that race should no longer be used?
Freebie II. Help us examine some specific part of Coates’ text by offering a Quotation, providing a 3-4 sentence Comment on it, and asking a Question that flows from the quote and/or comment.
“The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”(Coates 108). This just shows how concerned for his son that he would rather have him know about the dangers of the world he is living in rather than just burying his head in the sand. He acknowledges that the world is a cruel place, but still insists that his son learns about it in its entirety. As a person, would it be better to be ignorant of the awful things around you in order to protect yourself? Or should you force yourself and those around you to open their eyes, whether they want to or not, for the greater good?
Annotations:
“It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country.”(Coates 106). This quote shows how Coates seems to understand where he believes his place is in the world, whether it is just or not. It must be an incredibly difficult thing to have to explain this to a child one day in their lives.
“And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they named us matters more than anything we could actually do.”(Coates 120). This idea connects to earlier in the book when Coates keeps bringing up the idea that people believe they are white. He is slowly connecting for himself that labels don’t automatically exist or are the natural order, they arise from the desire for humans to create categories.
“And they would rather reach out, in all their sanity, and push my four-year-old son as though he were merely an obstacle in the path of their too-important day.”(Coates 105). Although I do agree that it was incredibly rude for those people to push his son and then act like that towards him, I don’t know if it actually started out as a race issue. It is all up for interpretation, but could those people have started out by simply being rude, and then escalated way farther than they should have?
“I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth” (Coates 78). Why might Coates see the killing of Prince Jones in this way? Or, how does shifting the focus from the actions of a single officer to the US and a historical fear of Blacks alter the way we see police violence or killing? In responding to the question, draw a text-to-text connection with another part of Coates’ text.
1.) When Coates speaks of this tragic event, he expands on the fact that he has heard so many stories of innocent lives being lost simply because they were black and in the wrong place at the wrong time. He claims that Prince was killed by his country because of the bias that many Americans were raised with was that black people in general would be more likely to commit crime and be more suspicious. This makes police treat people differently solely based on their skin color. His shift that he makes from one single police officer to the country as a whole shows his belief that this incident was not an isolated one, and that the American police system was built around the idea that skin color indicated suspicion. This fear connects back to earlier in the book when he was talking about growing up in Baltimore. “Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice– ‘Either I can beat him, or the police.’ Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t.”(pg 16). This quote shows how in his childhood, he was raised to always be wary of the police, because they would be out to get him more than out to protect him.
“The galaxy belong to them [Whites on West Broadway], and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs” (Coates 89). What do you think Coates means by this distinction between communicating terror and communicating mastery? Support your response with evidence from the text.
2.) By saying this, I think that Coates meant that white children were raised to believe that they could do or be anything they wanted, that they could accomplish their dreams. From his experiences in his childhood, he found that instead of telling their kids that they could be anything they wanted to be, they were instead warned that they could be hurt anytime that they left the house. “All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be ‘twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much.’”(Coates 90). This quote just goes to show the significant disparity between how children of different races are raised. This inequality of how children of different races are raised is one of the many issues that need to be solved if people want to truly reach equality for everyone.
Offer ONE SIGNIFICANT PASSAGE you will be prepared to read and offer as a vehicle for class discussion. Quote the passage and write a few sentences explaining WHY you chose it and WHAT you’d like us to discuss in it.
3.) “I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me… that you submit to a loss of time.”(Coates 92). I chose this passage because I think that this shows an immense amount of personal growth in Coates. It must have taken a lot of self-reflection to be able to recognize that the environment in which his child would be growing up in would not be the same as to what he was raised in. It shows his strength of character to be able to not fall into the tradition he has always known and instead decide to give his child the chance to be different. If more black parents had a safe environment in which to allow their children to also act this way, could this tradition eventually decline in the country? Or would the tradition still be perpetuated by the fear of the parents for their children?
Read “Black and Blue,” an early Ta-Nehisi Coates (link and class handout) newspaper article that reports on Prince Georges County and police brutality. It is nearly 20 years old and written when Coates was just 25. In 2020, what does Coates’ reporting tell you? Why?
4.) Coates’ reporting on the death of Prince Jones tells me that for being so young, he certainly did thorough research into the topic. His research demonstrates that this kind of brutality has been evident for a long time in America, especially in PG County. Additionally, in light of more recent events such as George Floyd, that just goes to show that the problem really hasn’t gotten a whole lot better. Usually when articles become this old, the information in them gets outdated as well as new developments arise. The fact that this article is still relevant to today’s society demonstrates how far the country has to go. “In over 30 years as Commonwealth attorney for Fairfax County, Robert Horan had never charged a police officer with a crime. After investigating Jones’ death, he declined to break with tradition.”(Coates Black and Blue). This quote from his article shows how important this case was to him that he decided to break with this long tradition.
The Mecca? Why does Coates refer to Howard University as his Mecca? What does he mean by “the crossroads of the black diaspora” (40)? In your explanation, be sure to include a quote from Coates.
1.) Coates refers to Howard University as his Mecca possibly due to the sheer amount of black history that had taken place there. Mecca, to people of religion, see Mecca as the very center of their religion and their beliefs, and an integral part of their history. “I first witnessed this power out on the Yard, that communal green space in the center of the campus where the students gathered and I saw everything I knew of my black self multiplied out into seemingly infinite variations.”(Coates 40). A diaspora is the dispersion of people of the Jewish faith outside of Israel. With this quote, Coates explains that in seeing all of these balck students, along with the placement of the university and the alumni before them, this was where black people from all walks of life came and joined together. Just as Mecca was important to the history and culture of the Jews, Howard University to Coates was the center of so many notable black people in recent history.
Coates writes of his “working theory” (46) and “imagining history to be a unified narrative” (47). Why might this have been important for Coates? What did he find/realize in his investigation? In your response, be sure to provide textual evidence from Coates. Note: we’re exploring together; it’s ok not to have all the answers, the right answer, etc.
2.)Trying to put together one coherent timeline of history was probably important to Coates because he wanted to learn at what point did people decide that having a different skin tone made someone below someone else. “The smokescreen would lift. And the villains who manipulated the schools and the streets would be unmasked.”(Coates 47). Although this was what he desired to learn by reading the history books, he quickly learned that it would not be that cut and dry. So many historical accounts had contradicted one another and he discovered “factions, and factions within factions.”(Cotes 47) of people who all had varying versions of the same time period. He simply set out in order to find the whole truth of why things were the way they were, but he found it to be a much more complicated topic than he had first expected.
How does Coates make meaning of his college experience? What’s his college story? Explain with evidence.
3.)When Coates was going through college, he thought that the classes that he was taking were kind of important, but not nearly as much as what he learned by reading in the library. “The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”(Coates 48). In college, he wanted to guide his own education, not learn about something because someone told him to. He instead would rather have educated himself about what he thought was interesting and important, than feel trapped by a higher education curriculum. By basically only studying what he wanted to, he shaped his own education regardless of what he was told to do. This gave his education more meaning to him than doing what he was told in his classes.
Freebie. Help us examine some specific part of Coates’ text by offering a Quotation, providing a 3-4 sentence Comment on it, and asking a Question that flows from the quote and/or comment.
4.)“What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle. I had always known this, had heard the need for a new history in Malcolm, had seen the need addressed in my father’s books.”(Coates 44). This assertion by Coates seems to be a monumental task, and also an incredibly difficult one. Not only is he saying that history itself is incomplete, but that it must also be wrong in some places. But through what he discovered in his history research, he learned that there is almost no part of history that doesn’t have multiple versions. If this is the case, then how are himself and others meant to even begin to figure out how to retell history from another perspective, especially since it has already passed.
Annotations
“But however it appears… all history.”(Coates 42). Coates is once again bringing up his idea that there is really no such thing as white. This still confuses me a lot, especially when he says that white could cease to exist, and there would still be people with straight hair and blue eyes. Does he mean that people should identify each other as their nationality and not the color of their skin?
“Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans.”(Coates 43). This connects to my English 110 Composition class, where we have just finished learning about cosmopolitanism and the implications for everyday life. We also learned about why it is so difficult to carry out cosmopolitanism when people’s views can be so different from each other. In a part of one of the articles that we read (Appiah), he described cosmopolitanism as the name of a challenge rather than a solution. We also wrote an essay and some reading responses on how cosmopolitanism can be used to cause a change in perspective.
“Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?”(Coates 44). Does Coates think that this is how black people are viewed today? I thought that maybe some really good strides toward equality had been made. His view could also have been shaped by how he grew up, which could be much different from how children grow up now.
1.)“Race is the child of racism, not the father” (7). Let’s puzzle through what Coates might mean by this. To do so, we need to grasp a bit of how the idea of White as a race emerged – and how Black as a race emerged. We need to read more than just that sentence or that paragraph in Coates. It might help if we ask why Coates uses language like “believing themselves white” or “raised to be white.”
1.) When Coates says this, he might mean that over time, this distinction of black and white was the result of the collective desire to create an “us” and “them”. Whether this was intentional or not, the desire of separation, or the feeling that one race was better than the other, led to the idea that there was such a thing as race. Race could be easily used to mark others as different, which made it easier to create more differences between race then there originally was. The idea of race being put above things like country of origin/nationality meant that the color of a person’s skin could be used to determine certain stereotypes about a person. Although it is unclear why people felt the need to place people into categories, maybe to make more clear cut lines between people perceived as different, something as obvious as someone’s skin color made them incredibly distinguishable. In this way, Coates is saying that the concept that one race is better or superior to another is what led to the idea of race in the first place, not the other way around.
Body. Find two places where Coates focuses on the matter of the body. Why do you think the “body” seems to loom so large for Coates? Explain.
2.) One place where Coates focuses on the matter of the body is on page 19, where he describes a boy not too much older than him pulled a gun on him. “There the boy stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could, in an instant, erase my body.” Then again on page 24, where he says “I recall learning these laws clearer than I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these laws were essential to the security of my body.” In both of these instances, Coates recalls fearing for the safety of his body. This idea seems to loom so large for Coates because it is the one thing that can’t be replaced. Being robbed does not destroy a person mentally as much as having their body taken from them. Constantly fearing for their body takes a mental toll on people that is different than just normal stress. This creates a constant sense of fear that people attempt to cover with aggression or anger. The fastest way to hurt somebody is by showing them that they are powerless when it comes to protecting their own bodies.
The “Dream.” This idea is important throughout the book. Let’s find a passage in our section where Coates discusses it and start to figure out what it is and why it might be important. Quote and offer your provisional/preliminary explanation or thoughts.
3.) Coates discusses the “Dream” on page 11, where he says that “I have seen all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts.” After he describes this dream, it is implied that this is basically the ideal life in America, but that this Dream can only be lived out by white people, and that blacks will never be able to achieve it. He establishes what he says is basically an impenetrable wall between the “good life” and the life of blacks in America. Although to me this does seem like the American dream, and it could be due to my own lack of exploration and experience, but in recent years, I don’t believe that it is completely impossible for blacks in America to gain the life that they want and deserve. I do think that black people make up a disproportionate amount of the poor class in America, but I also think that there are many successful black people today. I could be wrong, but this is based off of my own experiences, and I haven’t exactly done any research on the topic.
Freebie. Find one passage of interest to you. Maybe it’s something you don’t understand. Maybe it frustrates you. Maybe it seems really important to you. Quote and explain a bit. We’ll have an opportunity in class to share some of these to discuss.
4.) I chose a passage on page 11 “And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.” I chose this because it confused me a little bit. I don’t really understand why Coates says that he is sorry for white people, the country, and the person he is addressing in the book. Does he feel bad that people don’t know the whole truth? Does it have to do with the Dream that he mentioned? Is he saying that this Dream that some people live in is not the same as the real world, and if this is the case, isn’t each person’s reality the world they live in?
