Diversity Chapter 1 Assignment-America

What does it mean to be an American??? This is a question that will get several different responses depending on who you ask. To me, being an American means to represent diversity, ideas, freedom, higher education, and religious freedoms. I feel that this is an American because to me this is what America represents. America is a land full of diversity, a land full of different nationalities, full of different cultures. According to Larry Craig (What it Means to be an American, Part 1. Western Journalism. June 14, 2013.), our country was founded with people from six different European nations: England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, and Germany. This is one of the only places that you can see such cultural diversity and I love it. Being an American is having the freedom to have ideas and opinions, though some peoples ideas and opinions may not be politically and sometimes culturally accepting, it is the fact that you still have the freedom to have ideas and opinions. In America you have the right and freedom to pursue higher education which I feel is a wonderful freedom of being an American. The freedom to better yourself. And being an American is having religious freedoms. America is the one place where you can have a variety of different people with different religions and where a person can practice more than one religion or has the right to choose or change their religion. I feel that the current Miss America, Kira Kazantsev, is a good representation of an American. She was born to Russian immigrants who left Moscow in 1990 to pursue a better life here in the US, making her a first generation American in her family. She is a college graduate and drives the issue of protecting women against domestic violence. She represents diversity of having Russian culture, having the drive to better herself with gaining a meaningful education and furthering her education.

I currently did a comparison of my city, Owings Mills, with Rosedale. It was an interesting learning experience. Owings Mills tends to have a larger population than Rosedale with Owings Mills having a population of 30.622 versus Rosedale population of 19.257. The diversity of each city intrigues me as well. The racial makeup of Owings Mills consists of 28.5% white, 53.4% black, 8.2% hispanic, 8.0% asian, 1.3% two or more races and 0.6% american indian. Rosedale has 58.4% white, 31.4% black, 5.3 % hispanic, 1.6% asian, 2.5% two or more races, and 0.8% american indian. I honestly did not know that Owings Mills had a higher percentage of black people than white people especially when I see more white people and arabs in my neighborhood than black people. It was also interesting to learn that the median household income is higher in Owings Mills than Rosedale. I found the information very informative. And according to an article I read by Joel Kotkin (What American Demographics Will Look Like in 2050. Newgeography.com. March 15, 2010), we will have a boost in our US population. With the US being more fertile and having the highest fertility rate they are projecting to see another 100 million by 2050. Kotkin projects to see an even more diverse population with the large amounts of interracial and homosexual marriages. With these projections I project that my children and grandchildren will be exposed to an even more diverse society and may have larger families. I also project that growing up in an even more diverse society that my children or grandchildren will have a more cultured family with the possibility of marring someone of two or more races. I am excited about the idea of my children and grandchildren growing up in an even more diverse society because I feel that they will be exposed to more culture and the growing population portion, I just pray that the jobs will grow as well so that we do not have a huge population with high unemployment rates because of lack of jobs. So with this information, I plan to steer my children and grandchildren in a direction where their education will beneficial to always having a job in a high demand field.

A Class Divided

After watching the video "A Class Divided," Frontline (1995-2014). A Class Divided. Retrieved from http://http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html, I had so many mixed emotions. I am a black woman, so to see a demonstration that was a class full of white children with a white teacher teaching them about prejudice and discrimination had me with mixed emotions. I find the teacher Jane Elliott admirable for what she did because she was an individual conducting this demonstration for positive reasons and not for self gain.What I liked about the video is that you have this white woman that took it upon herself to create a demonstration to each third graders about prejudice and discrimination. That in itself I like because this is a woman that was from a town and teaching in a town where the majority were white individuals. She wanted these children to have true knowledge and a encounter of discrimination in a way that they would really understand. I also liked in the video how they also applied this demonstration to adults because it showed the difference in the understanding of the situation. Children are more impressionable than adults. I have to honestly say that I did not like how in the video when Ms. Elliott did the demonstration with the adults how the white woman that was in the blue-eyed group that was being discriminated against said, "You don't have to be black or Jewish to feel discriminated against..." Though this is a true statement, it still showed that she did not understand true discrimination. She is a white woman that wakes up white everyday that is not targeted or looked down upon because of the color of her skin. Though she was the one being targeted in this discrimination, she will never truly understand the pain that us minorities feel and have felt. With her being a white woman she will never understand a black persons problems and struggles of being looked at and treated lesser just because of the color of our skin. I was not surprised of how the blue eyed children treated the brown eyed children. They are children and children are impressionable. Once the teacher taught and embedded in their mind that just because they had blue eyes they were superior, there was no doubt in my mind that they were going to belittle and treat the brown eyed children like trash. That is how racism, discrimination, hatred was formed because individuals felt that they were superior than another group of individuals and had the right to mistreat them and began teaching this hatred to others and their own children. I feel the scenes that I will still remember a month from now is the how the children treated each other just because they felt they had a since of power, the statement that the blue eyed lady made that was being mistreated, saying that you don't have to be black or Jewish to be discriminated against, and the response that the brown eyed lady had in response, and the statistics that showed that because the one group that was being treated superior did better on the learning exercises than the group that was treated lesser. I feel that these scenes will stick out to me even a month from now because I find all of these things remarkable. Though this was a demonstration that was developed because of mark on history which was the assassination on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., these are still issues that we face and will continue to face. Racism, discrimination, and hatred are still alive, if it wasn't then we wouldn't be out here still having to show that BLACK LIVES MATTER.