La Guera

Okay, I don't necessarily want to get ahead of the class here, but i figure just hearing Kelsey and Addie's input won't be too bad.

I'd like to start off by saying that parts of this article made me feel really uncomfortable and... bad. Bad isn't a good feeling word, how about sad, guilty, cowardly, and malicious. When the author is talking about "the oppressor" you know who she is talking about - white males. She then goes on about how I shit on people, how I make people hate themselves, and how I cowardly refuse to own up to my own personal feelings. Did anyone else feel this way? She uses a male pronoun for the oppressor so it may not have hit anyone other than Tim and me that hard. Accusing me of shitting on people is a graphic, powerful image that almost made me put this article down.

Secondly, white people are the largest racial group in the country I believe. Probably more so in the 1930's. White people founded the United States, we conduct our business in English. This is my point: Should we feel guilty for having a dominant culture and language? I agree that its messed up that the author feels she has to deny her roots and language internally to herself, but of course its going to help to speak the language and be a part of mainstream culture when trying to engage in mainstream society. In a conversation I had with my mother about sexism at her work (she is the VP of research and development at a chemical company) she said that most of the sexism she has experienced in not blatant but rather subtle, the CEO of her company is male and it is easier to schmooze with him and get close to him being a male. Likewise, its going to be easier to get ahead with people of one culture if you participate in that culture. I'd love to see an example of a country where this is not the case.

Thirdly, a few of the things she had to say about the middle class were a little ridiculous I thought. What exactly does the sentence "They had enough privilege to be athiests, for chrissake" even mean? Maybe my puny, pampered middle class brain can't see the obvious - that working class people are discriminated against in the atheist (non)community. Then she portrays the parents of every middle class kid as "Hollywood filmmakers." Of course she does. The image of some artiste sitting on their ass yelling out directions while being fanned and fed from trays by assistants is, I'm sure, much more typical of the middle class than someone who is hard-working, highly educated, and in a high stress job. I guess its not ok to say that working class people are lazy but its pretty much the norm to say that middle class people are. And why not? If someone from the middle class has anything its not because the earned it - its because they were given it, just handed it because they were White and middle class. And if someone from the working class doesn't complete school its not because they are lazy - its because they were so grieved by all the material possessions that other people have and they don't that they were literally bedridden.
Let me tell you a little something about White privilege in the 1930's. My great-grandfather, the son of immigrants and experiencing his own prejudice due to his Irish heritage, had spent his life building up a farm from the ground up with his own blood sweat and tears. Like so many others at that time he relied on annual loans to keep his farm afloat and when the great depression struck he defaulted on those loans and lost everything. He moved his whole family including my young grandmother to Memphis, TN where he taught himself how to fix watches to keep his family afloat. My grandmother, whose dream it was to be an aviatrix (a female pilot) was experiencing her own prejudice as her high school teachers told her girls could not learn physics. She ended up in nursing school, having to abandon her dreams due to prejudice and the finances involved in flight school, where she thrived and eventually became famous in the field of prenatal care, coauthoring several books and eventually touring the world lecturing and doing workshops, literally helping to change the way prenatal care is handled in hospitals. I could go on with my mother's story but I think you get the point I'm trying to make about how easy it was just because you were White back then and how you basically just got to coast on your ass without doing a goddamn thing. Hollywood filmmakers indeed.

-Devin