Author: grant.743

Text Review -Grey’s Anatomy

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Grey’s Anatomy a medical show that has parts in it that are real and fake. Particularly an episode called “Crash Into Me”,In this episode a lot is happening hence the name. A patient( also an EMT that helps all kinds of people all day) comes in and needs surgery and while on the table the doctors and interns notice he has a swastika tattooed on his chest. Everyone in the episode is not that happy, one of the doctors even tells a family member that Dr.Bailey(Head of Surgery) who is a black woman is saving a white suprematist’s life. In the all in all they took an oath to save lives. They help the patient and even though is a very uncomfortable situation they stitch him and even try to give the best possible outcome to the healing scar. The patient wakes up to a jagged restitch and he is livid, even through his pain. O’Malley ask him about having a black partner and if he and his wife are friends. The patient says he’s just a guy with a belief system. O’Malley tells the patient “Dr.bailey saved your life today, a black woman at a great personal cost. Maybe next time you’re looking at your tattoo and thinking all us white guys are Better than everyone else you can think about that. Between you and me if I were in that OR alone you’d be dead.” We all know where most nazi groups stand, and for someone to get a tattoo of that , they definitely stand for what Nazi’s believe. I relate this episode to Spivak’s “can the subaltern speak?” I think mainly because Dr. Bailey was going through something at the time so not much was said. Dr. O’Malley Was able to speak up and though it may not have been the right words to say in a professional setting, he stood for what he believes and let the patient know that he’s wrong.

 

Diary of Systemic injustice showcase: Injustice in the school system

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“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”- Nelson Mandela. 

     For a very long time education has been one of the many recurring injustices. The education systems that we have are not necessarily set up for everyone to succeed. Let’s be honest for a second, we are all very privileged to be in America when we take out the race factor we all are equally privileged. As I clarify to say, equally privileged I mean to have cars, get paid more than $0.53 per day, to walk miles and miles just to get to work or school for a basic reading and writing education. We have laptops and phones to help us navigate this world. WE have an unequal distribution or academic sources in America. Schools in America go through this injustice like it’s a different country even though we’re all connected. This inequality leads to differences in the efficiency of students and ultimately suppresses economic mobility.

 

     Children that come from poor families, or live in poorer parts of the country go to school that don’t have the right equipment for the students to succeed. They don’t have textbooks, teachers or enough people  to fight for them to get better resources. Children that live in nicer neighborhoods have it all and its not the children’s fault, it’s the system’s. I can connect this to Persepolis in the aspect that Marjane’s parents had to send her to Austria for a better education. Iran was not suitable enough to give her the education and stability she needed. This was the only way she could escape from her living situation, and have a better life. They don’t want to put their tax dollars in these poor schools when they can just keep building up the richer schools. It’s also hard for parents to send their kids to these schools because school buses don’t go to the district or bus fare is expensive. I see this as a huge systemic injustice because it’s embedded in the system to not give much money or resources to the poorer communities. The U.S. ranks fifth in spending per student. Only Austria, Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland spend more per student. To put this in context: the Slovak Republic, which scores similarly to the U.S., spends $53,000 per student. The U.S. spends $115,000. The PISA report notes that, among OECD countries, “higher expenditure on education is not highly predictive of better mathematics scores in PISA.” (Ryan). The only way this injustice can turn around is to invest more money into our students, schools , and busing economy. Lower the pay for the police officers that aren’t even needed in these schools. Raise the teachers salary with the money taken from the officers salary.

 

Resources:

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/american-schools-vs-the-world-expensive-unequal-bad-at-math/281983/

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. Pantheon Books, 2004.

 

 

 

 

 

Achebe “Things Fall Apart” Context Presentation Week 6

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Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist who was widely know for his first novel “Things Fall Apart”,A very literal name for how the story goes written at just 28. He was paralyzed in 1990, but for years after he’s taught at Bard College in New York ( Caroline Toy).  This novel was first published in 1958 and was set in the last 19th century. It over all tells the story of pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of what is now known as Nigeria and the arrival of the Europeans.  This book has been translated into 50 languages with over 11 million copies sold. The novel was praised for its intelligent and realistic treatment of tribal beliefs and of psychological disintegration coincident with social unraveling. (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica) Chinua Achebe won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction.

In his novel published in 1958 he talks about culture that’s at its changing point. He wants to be able to educate people on the value of his culture. He sat down for an interview in 2008 with Jeffrey Brown. In this interview Jeffrey ask a series of questions regarding what Achebe intended by his novel 50 years ago. He feels as though it is his place to get this story of his people out to the world. He has already know so much about others and not about even his own. Achebe wanted to have the novel set in the late 19th century so it could have the element of change between the cultures. He briefly talks about religion and how “Christianity” was brought over by the Europeans, ‘foreigners’. He put it that after a while he started to think that the story about Christians wasn’t whole, so he went to understand the Igbo religion. This novel was a way for many people to connect even if it was not Nigerians. Achebe received letters from Koreans that called the novel he wrote his, they felt connected in the way that the Japanese colonized Korea (Caroline Toy). This was very much like Europeans telling Africa’s story.

 

References:

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Things Fall Apart”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Jul. 2017, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Things-Fall-Apart. Accessed 25 September 2021.

Transcript: “Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After Things Fall Apart”
Interview with Jeffrey Brown for PBS NewsHour, originally aired May 27, 2008
Transcript by PBS and Caroline Toy