RUSH

This is a documentary made for an AP Language course in high school. All of the footage is original except for the photographs of famous skateboarders Tony Hawk, Lance mountain, Eric Koston, Bucky Lasek, Marc Johnson, and Guy Mariano (sources below). Skateboarding is often criminalized here in Colombia due to the common stereotypes that tend to surround skateboarders and the sport in general, this documentary intends to disprove these stereotypes and show skating as we know it.

Lance Mountain → picture by Brandon Wong (http://radballs.com/tag/lance-mountain/)

Eric Koston → picture by Chris McDonald (http://skateboarding.transworld.net/1000078110/ugc/ugc-images/eric-koston/)

Tony Hawk → original picture was posted by himself on his instagram account. I found it here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2250097/Put-helmet-moron--Tony-Hawk-takes-daughter-skateboarding-helmet-responds-social-media-backlash.html

Bucky Lasek → picture by Steve Cave (http://skateboard.about.com/od/dewactionsportstournews/ig/Dew-Action-Sports-Tour-06/Bucky-Lasek-Skateboarding.htm)

Marc Johnson → Source of the picture is unknown but I found the image here: http://www.taringa.net/posts/deportes/3661587/Marc-Johnson-skater.html

Guy Mariano → picture by Muller (http://skateboarding.transworld.net/1000171338/photos/wednesday-wallpaper-guy-mariano/)

Rick Mccrank → photographer is unkown but I found the picture on the oficial Bones Bearings Blog (http://bonesbearings.com/team/rick-mccrank/)

A Breakdown in POV

As I immerse myself into the life of the sidewalk I have come to realize that this entire book is basically one giant POV shot. What Duneier is doing with Sidewalk is more than a sociological study. It’s an attempt for us disconnected whites to really understand what a POV shot consists of when the subject is a street vendor in New York City. Out of all the POV shots that have been constantly described in the final pages of Part 3 of the book, I’m going to discuss the two that shocked me most. The first case shows the POVs of street vendors or panhandlers that really need to use the restroom. The second shows the POVs of book vendors in the streets that yell out compliments at every woman that goes by.

Case 1à

POV # 1: a close up of Mudrick ‘s hand holding a cup and putting it on a low tree branch. The cup is his bathroom, the tree is where he stores it. Mudrick says he is not welcome in any restaurants, and there are no public bathrooms. To top that off, the police will arrest you for “pissing in the street” (page 174).

POV # 2: Ron looks around nervously to check that no one is seeing him as he pees exactly in between two cars. He’s being careful that nothing hits the cars or the sides of buildings because, though he doesn’t understand it, he knows people don’t like it. He has some restaurants that allow him to come inside to use the bathroom, but today he’s dirty and he’s been drinking and it would be disrespectful to walk in a restaurant like that. “When a person is dirty or stinkin’  he don’t want to go to a bathroom with decent people in there! You just don’t feel good about yourself” (page 177).

POV # 3: Raj, the guy from the Newsstand in the corner runs to a restaurant trying to find a bathroom as quickly as he can. When he finds no one to take care of the stand for him, he is forced o go in a cup. Unlike Mudrick, Raj still has a sense of privacy in this situation because he can do it inside the cubic Newsstand. He still feels embarrassed by this though, his shame isn’t impacted by the people around him but what he thinks he should do as a member of a supposedly civilized society.

POV # 4: A white man finds the poor black vendor peeing on the street. He finds it repulsive.

My interest in these points of view stems much further than how fascinating they are, I am more intrigued by the way they vary. Ron actually pees on the street sometimes as a sign of respect for other people. The white man, without knowing this, immediately thinks him uncivilized and likely to cause harm. Really? The guy just really had to pee. It is the interactions of all these points of view that makes up sidewalk life, and out of all of them, the most ignorant one is that of the educated white person who just knows this is not a right or a good thing.

Case 2à

POV # 1: Mudrick yells compliments at every woman who passes by. His explanation is that this all meant to be flattering for the women. “I say sweet things to a woman. Make her feel good. Like. You look nice. You look very nice. I’d like to be with you someday if I can. Try to make you happy” (page 193).

POV # 2à Framed in the shot is a woman’s upper body. Her face looks doubtful, her eyes are nervously checking back and fourth to see if the man that was harassing her just a few seconds ago is following her. Little does she know that this harassing guy she was trying to avoid just wanted her to feel good for the rest of the day.

Once again my interest in this type of activity lies in how the same situation can vary through different eyes. Why is it that Mudrick feels so kind and the woman feels so uncomfortable?

In the book, Duneier gives many theories as to why this is such a common phenomenon (the change of POVs amongst people of the same group I mean). Despite all the fancy names and long analyses. I’m just going to say that I don’t agree with the POV of white people as shown in both scenarios, mainly because we are criminalizing these vendors without any proof. When did the white population give itself the right to judge other populations based on so-called race?

Imagine what the world could be if we bothered to always ask ourselves why people are doing what they’re doing. Do we honestly think so low of street vendors that the idea that they enjoy relieving themselves in public seems logical in our heads?

Sadly, we’re humans. This means that we will most likely not ask ourselves why people are doing what they’re doing. We will not take lurking valuables into consideration. We will be a bad example.

Exacerbated (verb): made a bad situation or negative feeling worse

Relative Pride in the Street Life

As I begin reading Part 3 of Sidewalk I have come to two important realizations: first, the homeless people are still too proud to admit that they’re homeless and second, Mitchell Duneier is still too proud to think we trust his subjects in the study. If you’re wondering why this is being written at 2 in the morning, it’s because I just watched four hours of slam poetry on YouTube and I’m too proud to get a low grade on my blog posts. Pride as it turns out, is in everyone.

I had noticed this pride issue earlier in the book when the panhandlers of Sixth Avenue said they would never reduce themselves to looking through trash for a living. The scavengers who looked through trash for a living said they would never reduce themselves to begging. In the more recent chapters I noticed an emphasis on this pride, as the sidewalk dwellers don’t think of themselves as homeless people.

As this book continues there is an emphasis on how the choice to live on the streets comes about. “To understand the act of sleeping on the sidewalks, rather than assuming a person is making a trade-off between drugs and a room, it is always useful to consider a person’s overall logic…” (page 162). This brings powerful insight into the sidewalk world and human judgment. Why are people from the higher classes so proud that they immediately think someone on the street has no money, no education or intelligence, no other option, and is inevitable on drugs? If we could pay attention for a bit longer, we’d maybe see them as they see themselves: “street entrepreneurs” (page 172).

The pride in Duneier however, was shown in a single sentence: “”In one month he saved one thousand dollars for the winter and for a trip to see his mother in Florida. (I counted the money)” (page 164). Why did he have to add that he counted the money? Did he think that we wouldn’t believe if the amount based on just Grady’s testimony? Probably. The most devastating part of it all is that most people reading the book would have done exactly as Duneier expected, they wouldn’t believe the amount without upper-class/white testimony.

Pride as it turns out, is racist and classist.

Binge (noun): a short period devoted to indulging in an activity in excess. 

N-A-T-H-A-N-I-E-L and the Sidewalk

The Soloist tells the story of an African American prodigy named Nathaniel Ayers who lives in the streets of L.A, haunted with mental illness Nathaniel moved out to escape the pressures of Julliard and perfection. N-A-T-H-A-N-I-E-L he says whenever he introduces himself, as if he needed a remainder of who he is. Sidewalk has reached a point where Duneier has begun to discuss the “’dangerous, violent, and aggressive’ image of African-American men on the streets of New York City” (page 120). As I watched the aforementioned movie over thanksgiving break, I couldn’t help but wonder if there are many Nathaniels out there, geniuses undercover, kept on the streets because of their fears, pasts, and even mental sickness. The parallels between the vendors Duneier talks about in Sidewalk and Nathaniel in The Soloist are too big not to notice, even though the stories occurred in opposite sides of the United States and the characters have completely different trials and issues.

In The Soloist, Nathaniel Ayers is pushed towards life on the streets because of mental illness. In Sidewalk the vendors are pushed to this same situation by drug problems, lack of education, and time in prison. In both of the stories the characters grew up in violent areas, prone to crime and racial segregation. The vendors because of their minority status in a middle class town meant mostly for whites and Nathaniel because of the prominent majority of white students in Julliards. In Nathaniel’s case, this obvious difference between him and his schoolmates triggers schizophrenia, in the vendor’s case segregation triggers the “Fuck it mentality” that was discussed in previous chapters.

“More than half of the men who have lived on the street come from homes that conventional readers would call respectable” (page 122), similarly, Nathaniel’s mom owned a hair salon and his sister has a job and a house when Robert Downy Jr.’s character manages to contact her. Either way, they ended up on the sidewalk. Why? Nathaniel claims he likes to hear Los Angeles because there is nothing inside. Many of the vendors Duneier describes in Sidewalk chose to live on the street because they saw it coming anyway. Granted, Nathaniel lives in a completely different context due to his mental health (or lack thereof), but the similarities remain there. Furthermore, the two stories prove a point Duneier makes when he describes the situation of African American males in the sidewalk: “individual factors also have an influence” (page 122) on who ends up living on the streets.

The most striking similarity between The Soloist and Sidewalk is not the African Americans but the white men telling the story. For starters they both have designated names the black men assign to them: Mitch for Mitchel

l Duneier and Mr. Lopez for Steve Lopez (Robert Downy Jr.). Even though both white men treat the African Americans with respect and come to know them as people more than simple studies (or in Mr. Lopez’s case: columns), the relationship began with work in mind, not understanding. Will “Mitch” become as attached to the vendors of the Village as Mr. Lopez ended up with Mr. Ayers? (If you watch the movie you will understand why the switch from Nathaniel to Mr. Ayers has direct relationship to the moment of attachment, when understanding finally comes). Will Duneier help his characters as much as Mr. Lopez helped Mr. Ayers?

I guess that information shall come in Part 3. 

Voluntary and Involuntary Change ft. Choices

Just yesterday in a class discussion someone said that the Native American adaptation to the European colonial system in the Americas was voluntary. According to this person there is no involuntary adaptation because every native had a choice between dying and accepting the system. If anyone really didn’t want to adapt they could choose to die, and thus those who choose to survive are adapting voluntarily. In the second chapter of Sidewalk, Duneier discusses choice, and tries to define when change can actually be considered voluntary. Rather than trying to analyze the European colonies and the acceptance process of Native Americans however, Duneier focuses on the magazine vendors of Sixth Avenue and how they came to live in the sidewalk.

Marvin is the leader of all magazine vendors in Greenwich Village. He is a Vietnam Veteran and came back home to pay time in prison for an armed robbery he didn’t actually take part in. When he failed to find a job in the automobile business he moved to New York with his cousin and eventually began drinking. He had a wife, and even though he loved her alcoholism took him slowly away from her. After seven years of street dwelling he managed to sober up by asking for help from the VA (Veteran’s Administration) Medical Center and joining Alcoholics Anonymous.  His reason for living on the sidewalk: couldn’t find a job.

Ron is one of the best magazine vendors in NYC and he is also Marvin’s partner. When he was eleven he was summoned to America by a mother he had never met. He was kicked out of high school in tenth grade because of excessive absences. It turns out the reason he skipped school was because he was scared of the older kids who carried guns around campus. Both his parents were alcoholics and he followed the family trend perfectly. He’s been in Greenwich for seven years and he still abuses crack and alcohol often. When he was in the first stages of his drug addiction he called one day to quit his job and left his apartment to live on the sidewalk.  His main reason for street dwelling: he spent all his money on drugs and stopped caring about anything else.

It looks as if both these men had a choice in their move to the New York City sidewalk, but was the move voluntary? To put this question into context Duneier compares their move to the streets to Hakim’s move to the streets. When Hakim decided to move he was renouncing to the corporate lifestyle. He was renouncing the system even though he was perfectly capable of holding his own within it. When it comes to someone like Ron however, “the use of the term ‘choice’ means accepting something that seems inevitable” (page 43).  Are both of these changes voluntary?

My answer would be no.

The cases of these three street vendors reflect the difference between a choice and a voluntary decision. Sure, everyone can seem to have a choice, but that doesn’t mean that his or her change is voluntary.

I can very well give you the “choice” of whether I should stab you or shoot you. That doesn’t mean you died a voluntary death. Ron was given the choice to either abandon his house or wait to be evicted from it because he couldn’t pay rent. He chose, but his movement to the streets wasn’t voluntary). Ron and Marvin are the Native Americans. Hakim is more like the converts to Islam in the fifteenth century.

Regardless of whether their move was involuntary or not, these men have managed to survive in the streets only because of each other. The rest of chapter two discusses the complex moral support system that has developed in the sidewalk. Such mutual respect and comradeship between these men in the years they have spent together is more of an incentive to carry on than any consequence of the law or frown by the upper class passerby.

“I am thinking about the sidewalk. Thank goodness fro the sidewalk” (page 80).

Pathos and Broken Windows

Have you ever watched a documentary where you feel yourself getting sucked into a story rather than merely absorbing facts? Such is the case with Disney documentaries like African Cats, where every lion, cheetah, and cub has a name and a story. It’s more a narrative than it is an academic film. This is the feeling that took over to me as I was reading the first pages of Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier. Although the book was written as an academic text (as can be clearly seen in the introduction) the stories it tells are enough to make it seem like a narrative. More importantly, these stories give the book a human factor that allows the reader to sympathize with street vendors, in other words: pathos.

Surprisingly, Sidewalk has been told using mainly pathos, rather than the more academic centered logos that I had expected. Since the first page the book started on a pathos infused note by portraying a map before any text. This map shows one main street (Sixth Avenue) and to of the streets that intersect it. Along the street Duneier posted a head shot of every street vendor in his/her spot along with a sentence or two on each vendor’s story. Immediately the book becomes personal and all these “street vendors” become real people to the reader.

Hakim is a street vendor. He was born with the name Anthony E. Francis and (unlike what the stereotype of a street vendor suggests) he went through all four years of college at Rutgers University. In college “he had completed his coursework but never received a diploma” (page 23) because he owed $500 to the university by the end of his senior year. Already I sympathize with his story and I’m only thirty-six pages into the book. According to Duneier, Hakim sees himself as a public figure in the block and has enough insight and knowledge to be considered a mentor. Challenging every stereotype there is for a street vendor of any sort, Hakim has become a mentor for those who stop by his book stand regularly.

Amongst the many who consider Hakim’s insight and advice in their daily lives there is one twenty-two year old man named Jerome who works at The Vitamin Shoppe of the neighborhood. This man has a torn up family and never finished high school. Hakim’s advice? Go back and finish it. This ideal of going back to high school is accompanied by Hakim assigning Jerome books to read and discussing them with him to be sure he understood.

As the book continues more relationships like this are revealed to Duneier who in turn reveals them to me as a reader. I can’t help but be amazed at the insight of a man like Hakim. I admit to have fallen into stereotypical thinking, a realm where every street vendor is there because he has no other choice and where the street vendors who sell books don’t really know much about them.

Hakim decided to go into selling books in the street because he thought it would be an honorable job. Stereotype: shattered.

As I read the book I realized that we all fall for the “’broken windows’ theory “ (page 10).  This theory “holds that minor signs of disorder lead to serious crime (page 10). That’s how the author describes it in the introduction and despite how pathetic it sounds (it is a fallacy after all: the proof doesn’t lead to the conclusion) we all fall for it. “You shouldn’t walk through that neighborhood at night because there are street vendors on every corner.” “You should stay away from that street because it’s full of graffiti.” These are all sentences one might hear in any argument that supports the “broken windows” theory, and though they are clearly fallacious, we fall for it.

As I continue reading the book I expect more stereotypes to be broken and more stories to be told. On top of it all I will be getting constant information on the sociological approach on street life. If this didn’t make me excited for the book I don’t know what could.

Vocabulary:

 Punitive: inflicting or intended as punishment

.

Panhandlers: a beggar who approaches strangers asking for money

CASINO... Buy Them Today

This is the commercial for Casino Cigarettes, the product we (Cristina Angel, Daniel Owen, and me) invented to show fallacies in TV sales today. 

The Script: 

Two kids (look very popular and classy) are smoking in a party (Lana del Rey in the background). One nerdy kid is standing alone in the corner.
APPEAL TO POPULARITY

They approach her.

Boy: You need to try this! Casino made us so popular, now everyone likes us.
TAUTOLOGY

Girl: Yeah, you have two choices here: you can either smoke and be cool like us, or not smoke and be no one (laughs mockingly)
FALSE DILEMMA

Nerd: Wait isn’t it bad for you?

Girl: Oh my god! You have beautiful nails! They’d look even better holding a Casino!
RED HERRING

Boy: Come on, smoke Casino and you’ll be a star.
POST HOC ERGO PROPTER HOC

**Written at the bottom of the screen: “No reported cases of cancer. We are not unhealthy!!”**
IGNORANCE AS PROOF

The Nerdy kid takes a cigarette and inhales, as soon as she exhales the music starts and everything turns into color. She smiles and they all laugh and walk away together.

The slogan appears on screen: “ALL OF HOLLYWOOD DOES IT… JOIN THE CLUB”
HASTY GENERALIZATION

The Pathos in Gun Reports

The Gun Report: November 13, 2013

By: Joe Nocera

The problem with guns in the United States has been snowballing ever since the school shootings began, and it continues to grow larger as the some people of the U.S.A believe that it should be their right to hold a gun while other’s believe that the idea of guns being sold freely is ludicrous. Lately, all the opinions I’ve heard led to the latter conclusion, and all the arguments make perfect sense. The most eloquent of all these arguments against guns was buried in the opinion area of The New York Times ever since yesterday. Joe Nocera’s “Gun Report” centers itself on pathos to convince people that the free sale of guns in the United States is more dangerous than it is beneficial to each person’s personal protection.

Nocera starts off the article by explaining his own relationship to the free sale of guns. He emphasizes on how impersonal it was for him until not to long ago when a gunshot ended the life of a friend of his. That was when the possession of firearms became a personal subject.

The majority of the article however is not centered around his own experience, but merely quotes reports from various sources, all of them on the same date (November 13, 2013) which show the harm guns can do. These articles span from robberies gone wrong, and attempted murder to suicide and successful murder. In all of them the victims were wounded/killed by a gunshot. This part of the article is important because it focuses on sympathizing with all the other victims of guns in the United States

In the first part of the article Nocera shares his story, making the audience sympathize with him. In the second part he shares other people’s stories, to sympathize with the audience. As if sympathizing weren’t enough, the sheer amount of reports where gunshot wound feature in just one day is enough to amaze anyone, and push them towards his same conclusion: guns shouldn’t be so easy to find and carry.

Nocera doesn’t say much about the reports when he is done listing them, he just gives one statistic to make the amount of damage guns do even more substantial in the reader’s eyes: “an estimated 10,455 people have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown massacre on December 14, 2012.” (Let’s not ignore the number in bold type here).

If you’re even beginning to doubt that an argument just by pathos works…you should read the comments in the article.

Skilled at Life (?)

Am I skilled at life? Discovery through high school rubrics. 

Three in One

Due to a sad combination of a rather amazing and depressing quality of mine I like to call single minded procrastination and the lack of internet in the middle of Anapoima, I did not complete the blog entries for the memoir we read during October break. I did finish the reading, it was the writing that was compromised by my apparently overtaking need to lie in the sun in fetal position and ignore college applications and other important responsibilities of life. So now without further ado and excuses I present a very late, very lonely, but extensive, three in one blog post about Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Throughout this entire memoir, Winterson keeps a very intense bitter tone about her childhood and her life in general. The psychological issues that come with being adopted, unacceptable in a small community, and utterly lonely in a broken family are strong in her and they are shown slowly throughout the entire book, getting more personal and complicated as she speaks of the more recent time in her life. One lead that accompanies her throughout the retelling of her life is the importance of language and reading as she began to discover who she was and what she wanted to do with her future. The bitterness, the epiphanies about language, and the overall satirical view Winterson takes on the forgotten town of Accrington which saw her grow up make this memoir unbelievably funny, honest, and profound.

The entire book starts with a chapter titled “The Wrong Crib” in which Winterson introduces the whole premise of her childhood as an orphan and the confusion over her adoptive parents. All her doubts are easy to understand; after all, why would someone adopt a child only to constantly tell them they are the “wrong crib”? Why would someone bother to go through the process of adoption only to ignore the child and refuse to love him/her? Later on in the memoir the answer to these questions is presented in the form of a stranded birth certificate for a boy. As it turns out, Mrs. Winterson was supposed to adopt Paul, but that didn’t work out and she was stuck with Jeanette instead. At the start of the story however this information is not disclosed as it isn’t really necessary to understand what Winterson is trying to explain: abandonment and silence. According to her “unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven” (page 9).  This intense feeling of incarceration in her own life brings the author to her first language epiphany: she needed words to escape the silence. 

As the book continues Winterson eventually discusses her sexuality, but one comes to a quick reassessment of the story as soon as she does. This memoir isn’t a story centered on sexuality and coming to terms with it. It is a story centered on what a messed up family and old-fashioned town can cause someone of a different sexuality. Winterson never needed to come to terms with being gay. Winterson never doubted that she was gay. Winterson suffered at the hands of her town for being gay. Throughout her childhood she was disliked and even hated by her adoptive mother, but this gets a million times worse when Mrs. Winterson finds out that she is gay. Once the rest of the town finds out about her sexuality she is exorcized, because clearly a person who isn’t a depressed heterosexual in an unhappy marriage must be possessed by the devil. The irony of it all is that the priest tries to rape her during the final stages of the exorcism in an attempt to convince her that “it would be better than with a girl” (page 81).

Eventually Winterson comes to the second epiphany about language by stating that the main thing literature offers is “a language powerful enough to say how it is” (page 40). This happens shortly after she discovers the library in Accrington and starts her journey through “English Literature in Prose A-Z”. Slowly she begins to create a stash of books under her mattress. Obviously in a house where there were only six books, one of which was the Bible and two of which were commentaries on the Bible, this stash was a problem. As a child, the only literature she had been exposed to was Jane Eyre, but this was corrupted by Mrs. Winterson who changed the story to make Jane Eyre marry the missionary and go off to help him. This shows us just how intent Mrs. Winterson was on keeping her “daughter” within the boundaries of the traditional structure of the town they inhabited. When Mrs. Winterson found the stash she burned all of Jeanette’s books, which leads us to the third epiphany: “Fuck it… I can write my own” (page 43).

I could go on and on about epiphanies in the book. I could write about how in the end Winterson discovers that “creativity is on the side of health- it isn’t the thing that drives us mad” (page 171). I could write about what it means that she calls her adoptive mother Mrs. Winterson throughout the entire memoir and how this indicates the resentment and bitterness she carries inside. I could even talk about her sanity crisis when she decided to look for her birth mother and all the epiphanies she continued to have about writing. I won’t do any of this. Both a literacy narrative and an extremely personal memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is worth reading and I’d rather not spoil more of it than I already have. 

On Being Free Before Setting Yourself Free

When I finished reading Frederick Douglass’s memoir, I came to the conclusion that it can be divided into two main parts: his transformation into a slave and his change into a free man. The idea was given to my by Douglass himself so I can’t take credit for it, but I do believe that this division in the memoir is more important than he made it seem when he mentioned it in passing.

The exact moment where the memoir enters part two is when Douglass fights Covey to the point where the man is scared of him. It is in this moment when he becomes a free man regardless of his position as a slave, in other words, even though he was still “a slave in form, the day had passed forever when [he] could be a slave in fact” (pg. 78) It is at this point in the narrative that we notice a change in Douglass’s passion for freedom. Now he doesn’t just yearn for it, he believes fully in the fact that he deserves it and is confident that he will eventually get it.  Up to this point, Douglass was a slave inside his head as well as by the law.

This idea seems revolutionary to me. The first step towards freedom is, according to Douglass’s experience, thinking of oneself as a free man. It makes sense when considered in perspective from all these years later. Slaves had their inferiority so engraved in their heads that the idea of setting themselves free seemed impossible. It was a mere fantasy because they did not consider themselves free men. Slaves were held captive by themselves as much as they were by their masters. Consider it this way: the ratio of slaves to slaveholders in a plantation was wildly unbalanced toward the slaves’ side. Had they considered the right to be free as something that should be applied to them revolting would have been almost laughably easy.

 In the end slavery was nothing more than a play of power between an aggressive majority and a disenfranchised minority.

It could be said that Douglass was treated better towards the end of the book what with him being able to work for himself and all, but it is easy to understand how this might not be a satisfying arrangement. He was still someone else’s property according to the law. Regardless of the money he saved and the clothes he finally bought for himself, he wasn’t free. Douglass was stuck in a situation where he had the worst of both worlds: the trials and sufferings of a poor free man and the misery of belonging to someone as a slave.

Another interesting issue in the ending of the memoir was Douglass’s refusal to give away the methods he used to escape. On this topic I disagree extensively with Cristina (another blogger in the AP Lang world) and what she mentioned in her last blog post. About this idea of avoiding the escape route details in the memoir Cristina states the following: “I know, he couldn’t just give out the secret recipe for all the freedom-hungry slaves.” I think Douglass’s intention when he didn’t put the route in writing was the exact opposite of that. He wasn’t trying to keep slaves in their place, as an escapee that would make no sense and it would be extremely hypocritical. What he didn’t want was to give the white people the details of the route. He clarifies this when he talks about the well-known Underground Railroad and how it has been so publicly acclaimed that the whites that are looking for an escaped slave know exactly where to go. The open declarations of the Underground Railroad do “nothing towards enlightening the slave, whilst they do much towards enlightening the master” (pg. 100). Douglass kept his route a secret in order to keep white men away from it, not to keep it closed to fellow slaves looking for freedom.

It should also be noted that Douglass gave full names of everyone who helped him get a life once he was in New York, clearly leaving a trail for any escaped slave who arrived to free land with the same confusion as he did. He understood the loneliness and fear slaves might feel when they achieve their freedom. He grasped the “now what?” feeling perfectly and thus he left a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow if they needed help integrating into free lifestyle. A trail that started with a breadcrumb officially known as “MR. DAVID RUGGLES” (pg. 106). Come on, why else would he capitalize the whole thing?

Also important to note is Douglass’s observation that everyone seemed happier in free country. Not only the colored people but whites as well, leaving the reader the distinct feeling that everyone is better off without slavery. In the end, we probably are. Too much power is never good for men.

I say goodbye to this memoir with a quote from Clash of Kings by George R.R Martin, which is extremely relevant to my reflections in this blog post:

“Power resides only where men believe it resides…A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.” 

Can Anything Stop It?

According to Quentin Hardy in his blog post “Global Slavery, by the Numbers” there are 27 million slaves world wide today. This statistic is worrying not only because of its sheer size, but because of the common belief that slavery today doesn’t exist at all. It is this belief about slavery that keeps it alive: less people are aware of it and those that are aware of it don’t know how to fight it because it is so well hidden, thus it continues to be stupidly easy for human traffickers to profit from their work.  Whilst reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave thought about writing a blog entry comparing slavery today with slavery back in pre Civil War America. Now that I am writing though, I find it more important to note and compare efforts against slavery back then and efforts against it now.

Back in Douglass’s time, slavery was countered with the idea of abolition. The north was fighting to abolish slavery, in other words they were trying to make it illegal. Now however, there are laws against slavery, its become a type of contraband, which makes the ways to fight it much harder to think out. Basically its like trying to fight the music downloads, you can catch as many people as you want but it will keep happening. Why? Because it’s easy.  So many people need help today, they need money, they need to be saved from something, and it’s disgustingly easy to trick them into debt or binds they can’t run away from.

In his memoir, Douglass mentions how slaves were divided up and given to their master’s children once the master’s died. They were tied up amongst the animals, “horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children, all holding the same rank in the scale of being” (pg. 56).  As deplorable as these conditions may be, I feel like they are much worse now. Sex slaves aren’t even divided amongst their master’s children; they are sold to anyone who will pay the price. There are no limits or protection. There are no records or any way to track these people after they get sold into sex trade. As the movie Taken so clearly dramatizes for us: after three days, any hope of finding these people is gone.

So how do we stop slavery today? There is no longer the choice of abolition, there are no laws to abolish. There is no option for civil war, slavery now is globalized and hidden. The only way to fight it is protesting. What types of protests are right though? Traffickers couldn’t care less if we march down the streets with banners and signs screaming “stop human trafficking!” We need to upgrade. We need something that will make people feel ashamed. We need something like this:

Questions on Slavery Today

A. Define the term glut on page 2.

Glut (n) = excessive/abundant supply of something

B. Evaluate this article's lead using the criteria we established in class.

“Slaves are cheap these days.” It leaves the why out of it à doesn’t explain why slaves are cheap or why it is such a worrying issue.

C. Create a visual organizer for some of the statistics cited.

- 27 million people are enslaved right now (more than any other amount in world history)

·      3^rd revenue earner in organized crime after drugs and arms.

- 14000-17500 people are trafficked into the US every year

- debt bondage is the most common form of slavery (traps from 15 to 20 million people)

- Slaves used to be worth $40,000 à they can be bought for $30 now in the Ivory Coast

- 80% of the people trafficked across national borders are female

·      70% of those females end up in the slave trade

D. How has the United States government tried to stave off human trafficking? Cite examples. Are these measures fair? Why? Why not?

The increase of trafficking in the U.S has been answered with new laws such as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act 2000, a confirmation of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime which began in 2000, and an increase in the information shared between nations to fight trafficking. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act has a purpose to “combat trafficking in persons…to ensure just and effective punishment of traffickers, and to protect their victims.” While the UN Convention was more of an agreement between countries which had a similar purpose. These methods seem fair because they try to promise safety for the victims as well as punishments to those who traffic, to top it off, they were planned and discussed on a global scale, which makes them more useful over all.

E. Why does Leach use Deng's story ?

Leach uses Deng’s story to exemplify slavery today and make it more real in readers’ heads. It is an appeal to pathos from the author, where she tries to make the readers feel sympathy for a slave in this time and open their eyes in a more brutal way to the fact that slaver is in fact real in our lifetime.

F. Compare this understanding of slavery to the antebellum slavery in the United States according to Douglass.

This understanding of slavery seems a lot bleaker than it was in the United States during Douglass’s time because slaves are worth even less than they were before (this implies that they can be more easily bought around the world and that they need to be exported on a mass scale in order for the traffickers to make any kind of profit), and because it isn’t even noticed around the globe. Slavery now is centered more around women and children with emphasis on the sex trade, while before it was more centered around working. Certainly slavery is more restricted now than it was before: it is illegal in every country and most people around the world are morally opposed to it while in Douglass’s time it was a wide culturally accepted phenomenon. 

Understanding

There are exceptions to every rule, even those that seem most ludicrous and unfair. When I was reading the next two chapters in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave this thought kept jumping into mind as Douglass narrated all the changes he lived through when he moved to Baltimore. As he explains in the novel, the rule in plantations and cities is interchanged: slaveholders in plantations were cruel and seldom could you find one that didn’t beat his slaves bloody. Slaveholders in the city on the other hand, were much better masters, mainly because they weren’t willing to receive “the odium attaching to the reputation of being a cruel master” (Page 46).  I was also shocked with Douglass’ outlook on his new life (which was more positive than I would expect it to be) when he was first told about his impending move to Boston. The use of logos in chapters five and six however, gave me the ultimate surprise; not only because this was the stem of rhetoric I thought would be used least (if at all) in a memoir about slavery, but because the memoir has been so centered on pathos up to this point (you can read about the use of pathos in the book in my previous blog post).  All in all, although very short, chapter’s five and six provided twenty minutes of good reading.

When Douglass discusses his change of homes and how little it affected him, he also discusses the difference between slaveholders in the plantations and slaveholders in the city. It makes sense that social pressure and what other people may think would tame the slave owners in the city. In Baltimore it was all a concept of image: no one wanted to be the slaveholder living right beside a slave less family who hears the cries of mistreated slaves. This social pressure is what Douglass thinks makes masters in the city kinder than they were in the plantations where no one could hear or see what happened to slaves. The exceptions to the rule in the cities are masters like Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton, who mistreat their slaves beyond belief giving little thought to what others may think. The two slave girls that belonged to Mr. Hamilton were, according to Douglass, the most “mangled and emaciated creatures [he] ever looked upon” (Page 46). The youngest slave girl in the Hamilotns’ care was but fourteen years old and she was so mistreated that “she was oftener called “pecked” than by her name” (Page 47).  The exception in the plantations on the other hand was Master Daniel Lloyd, who Douglass served before being shipped off to Baltimore. Out of all the white people he knew at the Great House, only Master Daniel seemed to care about him in any way, getting to the point where he “would not allow the older boys to impose upon [Douglass] and would divide his cakes with [him]” (Page 39).  This change on the treatment of slaved dependant of social pressure is interesting to say the least. It highlights the fact that people tend to care about what others think, linking back to previous chapters where Douglass mentions that all slaves were expected to say they had kind masters.

Douglass’ attitude about his move to Boston also provided immense shock value in the story. One would think that he would feel uncomfortable being shipped off without a choice, or maybe even apprehensive of what was expected of him in a big town. To my surprise, his reaction was the complete opposite: excitement about what was to come and positive expectations of his future in Baltimore. Douglass is so excited about his new life in the city that he doesn’t care when his mistress asks him to wash off until he is pristine. He clarifies in the book that this “pride of appearance” (Page 40) is not his own, but he still does it with glee, hoping that what he will find in the city is better that what he has lived his whole life, and comforting himself with the idea that it can’t be any worse.

Notice how everyone queuing to read is white, or is that just me? 

This comfort that Douglass uses on himself leads into the biggest surprise in these two chapters: the use of logos. In order to reach the conclusion that the worst he could get is the same Douglass would have to be able to analyze his situation and compare it to what he imagined in other plantations, in other words, it requires the use of logic. The idea of a seven-year-old slave comforting himself with logos is rather unbelievable to be honest, which is what makes me think that this might be an argument Douglass considered in retrospective when he was writing the memoir. Regardless of when he came to this idea, it is a clear example of logos, which makes it noteworthy in this memoir. Yet another use of logos can be found in chapter 6, when Douglass decides to learn to read because his master said that he shouldn’t. This determination he gets from the challenge his master gave him (Mr. Auld basically said that slavery and education were wring for each other, implying that slaves are stupid and not worthy of education) required logic to achieve. Just one phrase of opposition from his master was enough for Douglass to finally understand and attribute “to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man” (Page. 45).  These examples of logos show, for the first time in the memoir, how Douglass began understanding the world around him.

These two chapters have been the most interesting in the memoir for me so far. Douglass has stopped talking about what he saw around him in plantation and began to actually delve into his own story, sharing how he began to understand the world around him and the main differences he found when he moved from the plantations. These chapters make me more eager for what lies ahead in the book. Is Douglass going to continue using logos as he explains his conclusions about slavery and how he came to them? Will we hear more about his master’s opinion of slavery and education? I guess there’s nothing to it but to keep reading and find out.

Thinking About Reading

Sherman Alexei in 2002

In class we read a literacy essay titled "The Joy of Reading: Superman and Me" by Sherman Alexie, an Indian who taught himself how to read using a Superman comic book. In his essay, Alexie reflects on the importance of reading and how it helped him knock down doors that would have been closed had he never learned. He also explains how he learned to read and how it made him feel as a small boy enclosed in an Indian Reservation. The following questions were our reflections after reading the essay:

1)   What is Superman doing in the comic book panel Alexie remembers? Why is it important to remember this detail at the very end of the essay?

When the author first learned to read, Superman was breaking down a door in the comic book he was examining. It is important to remember this detail because at the end of the essay he uses it as a metaphor in which he is Superman and the door are the small Indian boys that refuse to let him help them “save [their] lives” (pg. 18).

2)   In paragraph 7, Alexie repeats a certain verb fourteen times. What is this verb, and what effect does this repetition have? What might Alexie be trying to say about the process of his coming to literacy, in terms of both the effort required and the height of the obstacles encountered?

The verb repeated so many times in the seventh paragraph is “read.” The reason Alexie repeated this word so many times was to emphasize the fact that he learned how to read by reading, nothing more and nothing less. With the repetition of this word he implies that the way to break down all the doors and surpass the obstacles set on Indian youths is by reading.

3)   In “Learning to Read and Write,” Frederick Douglass writes, “In moments of agony I envied my fellow slaves for their stupidity” (par. 6). Compare this sentiment to Alexie’s feelings about his fellow classmates on the reservation. Do you think that Alexie envied his classmates? Why or why not? How were his difficulties from those faced by other Indians?

In contrast to Douglass, who envied the slaves who couldn’t read because they weren’t burdened with knowledge, Alexie didn’t envy his classmates who refused to read or write. He says himself that “[he] was smart. [He] was arrogant. [He] was lucky” (pg. 17). This indicated that unlike Douglass, he felt empowered and (up to a certain extent) better than the rest of his classmates because of his ability to read and write. His difficulties were much less than those of his classmates because by learning to read he opened doors that would not be available to anyone else in the reservation. He could get a better job and make a better living than them because of it.