Author: ham.95

Text Review- Jaelen Ham

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One of my favorite book series of all time is The Hunger Games series. While it made a very large wave in pop culture, the novels themselves actually are really insightful, and provide a lot of interesting social commentary. If you don’t know what happened in The Hunger Games, it’s pretty simple. The novel takes place in a dystopian society, called Panem, where there is one capital, literally referred to as “The Capital,” and twelve districts. Citizens of the capital live in luxury while the districts- some incredibly poor- provide for them. In order to remind the districts of The Capital’s power, each year 2 children (ages 12-18) are selected from each district to participate in a competition called “The Hunger Games,” which is literally a fight to the death. The novel follows a young girl named Katniss, who is selected to compete in The Hunger Games for her district, which is the poorest district in the country. All tributes (those who are participating in the games) are trained for the games in the capital, where they get to experience a taste of the luxurious living style. Katniss makes many, many comments that highlight the injustice and abuse of power present in Panem. One example is when Katniss literally asked what a shower does, because Katniss’s district doesn’t have running water. Like many of the works we’ve read in class, The Hunger Games comments on injustice in an adaptive way, where the author manifests her opinions on our society in a made up society. I think the Hunger Games strives to highlight how the unequal distribution of resources affects people, in any day or time. We could even go further to say that the novel suggests a large cycle of inequity, where birthrights determine if you will live or die. To some degree, this is true in our world. While our country doesn’t select citizens for a fight to the death, there are many policies that support a cycle of injustice mainly targeting racial minorities. Based on who you’re born to and how much inherited power you have to overcome the system, your fate, while not necessarily sealed, is strongly suggested. 

 

Diary of Systemic Injustice Showcase

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This week a friend of mine had an experience that opened my eyes to a huge injustice in the United States that we hardly pay attention to! My friend is in a sorority, and last year when all the Black Lives Matter protests were at their peak, her sorority added a diversity and inclusion chair, which she was selected for in its first year. As a Puerto Rican latina who has the physical features of a Puerto Rican (black hair, brown skin), she has experienced injustice first hand and knows what she as a person of color can do to help fellow people of color.  Greek life is predominately white, and when this year’s elections came around, her white peers elected a white counterpart to take over the position this year. 

I looked into national statistics to see if this unacceptable injustice is happening on a larger scale. I found out that while many companies have made a public effort to increase their diversity efforts, the corporate workforce is still headed by nearly all white people. 85% of executive positions were held by whtie people at the company Mercer in 2020. (Stevens, CNBC). These statistics are representative of a general promotion gap that exists in the corporate workforce. A promotion gap can be historically explained, as when slevery was still legal white people literally were the executives and black people were their workers. It took us centuries to even recognize that forcing people into slavery positions based on their skin color is incredibly cruel, unethiucal, and inappropriate. However, when slavery was abolished, people of color still had to fight for their rights. While we have made a lot of progress, there is clearly still a large gap based on skin color that’s represented in systemic issues like a promotion gap. 

 

Click this link to learn more about the history of slavery:

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery

 

In class, we have discussed the master-slave dialect that can be seen between different identities and groups. In the United States, I think we naturally have a master-slave view between white and black people because of slavery, which was present in Great Britain and the thirteen colonies, and not abolished until the nineteenth century. Slavery has been legal in the United States longer than it has not been, so we really have not had as much time as we think the break this master-slave view. This may be why white people are often seen in executive positions more commonly than people of color in general, and especially black people. The image below provides statistics that highlight discrimination people of color in the workplace, which can be accredited to the master-slave dialect and its associations with a white master and black slave.

The issue of discrimination and its impacts on people of color is large. People of color are statistically lacking in executive positions where they can have true influence on diversity and inclusion efforts. As a caucasian person, I know that I am naive to what the best way to handle these kinds of issues are, simply because I have not experienced the injustice that people of color have. Regardless, white people are still making decisions for their companies/organizations people of color. Specifically, white people are in power positions related to diversity and inclusion, when they should not be making those decisions for people of color.

 

History of Chinese Immigration Context Presentation

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The United States has a long and complicated relationship with foreign immigration, especially with Chinese immigration policy and restrictions. The earliest immigrants from China to the United States settled mostly on the west coast, where they found low-skilled jobs. However, with the number of Chinese immigrants growing rapidly, the U.S. public began to form negative and bigoted opinions about the immigration and the chinese population as a whole. Largely because of the negative “public sentiments,” Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This act placed intense restrictions on Chinese immigration and allowed virtually no immigrants to enter the United States until the act was repealed in 1943 and replaced by more general immigration policies in the 1960s. 

 

 

The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first ever federal level policy in the United States to discriminate against a certain ethnic group. This left a lasting impact in our subconscious view of the Chinese race as a whole, and as immigrants in our country. This subjected congress to a complicated policy level view of immigration, nearly a century passed before the currently standing Immigration Act of 1990 was passed. 

 

The Immigration Act of 1990 put more welcoming conditions in place, but still has not fixed the rough conditions that immigrants are subjected to in our present day. The act places limits on the number of immigrants allowed in the country, and it subjects certain demographics to a more difficult immigration process than others. In our reading this week, the main character Deming is put up for adoption after he loses his main caretakers for immigration related reasons. Deming proceeds to americanize himself significantly, maybe unconsciously due in part to the struggles his family faced with America at a young age. Our country’s problematic immigration policy affects far too many lives, and we see this first hand in the novel. 

 

Sources

“Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).” Our Documents – Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=47. 

“Immigration Act of 1990.” Ballotpedia, https://ballotpedia.org/Immigration_Act_of_1990. 

Jeanne Batalova Carlos Echeverria-Estrada and Jeanne Batalova. “Chinese Immigrants in the United States.” Migrationpolicy.org, 2 Feb. 2021, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/chinese-immigrants-united-states-2018.