Author: meyers.507

Text Review

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Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights is a television series that follows the lives of American teenagers playing high school football in a little town located in Texas.  This football team features players of different races, including white, black, and Latino, though for this assignment I plan to focus on the injustices that the star running back for the Dillon Panthers, Brian “Smash” Williams faces.  Particularly in season two, they shed some light on the racial injustices that were happening in Texas at this time.  Though this is a fictional television series I feel that these events were based off issues that could potentially occur and probably were occurring at this time.  In this season of the show Brian became involved with a girl he went to school with who was white.  She was helping him with his college recruitment stuff since he wanted to go to college for football.  She had been through this process with her older brother who was very successful and playing college football at the time.  Their families had gotten together to meet and agrees that their relationship would be seen as inappropriate since she was white, and he was black.  They kept on seeing each other despite what their parents had said, and it led to some issues involving Brains little sister at the movie theater.  A group of white boys started harassing her because she was sitting alone, and his brother was with this girlfriend.  A fight resulted and Brian was then sued for assault and forced to put out an apology even though they were saying racist things and harassing his sister.  By the end of the season, he decides to share his side of the story and tells the news that he should not have apologized because they were being racist.  This caused many problems for his football career.  This television series started filming in 2006 and I feel that it shows many of the issues and injustices that black Americans can face daily.  It strongly relates to the diary of injustices posts that we researched and wrote for this class.

 

Systemic Injustice Showcase

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The Covid-19 pandemic has had very tough impacts on us as a whole and a nation.  It has swept across our nation for over a year now and continues to leave lasting effects to this day.  Throughout this pandemic and the lockdowns, many people, including myself, relied heavily on the internet and the local news channels to get information and updates on what was going on.  Everything was shut down and many people weren’t leaving the house very often because there simply wasn’t anywhere to go.  Many people were getting sick, and hospitals were filling up very fast.  We were in a complete lockdown and quarantine.  People were in need of ventilators and hospital rooms that simply weren’t there.  A time that I remember very vividly is when my brothers and I were over at my dad’s house eating dinner.  While eating we always had the news on to get the latest updates as to what was going on.  On this particular night, they were talking about the numbers of people getting sick and the hospitalizations that were occurring as a result.  They went on to discuss the effects that the Covid-19 pandemic was having on a wide range of different people.  From this news broadcast and other forms of media that we were seeing at this time, it became pretty clear that the impacts people who aren’t white were facing were much greater than those who are white were facing.  As states by the commonwealth fund, “The Covid-19 pandemic’s impact in the United States has exposed long-standing inequalities by race, ethnicity, and income.”  This statement holds a lot of meaning and value when discussing inequality that people face in the United States.  They also go on to state that, “More than half of Latino and nearly half of Black survey respondents reported experiencing an economic challenge because of the pandemic – substantially more than the 21 percent of white respondents.”  I feel that this is a huge systemic injustice.  That is a huge difference in percent that goes to show that the Unites States as a nation has issues that must be sorted out.

Over 300 COVID-19 patients wait days for admission in Metro Manila hospitals

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/2020/sep/beyond-case-count-disparities-covid-19-united-states?gclid=Cj0KCQjwrJOMBhCZARIsAGEd4VFlSOe-piSHdR1C4LqgxK6oDt-QlloDc44Xjo4jo1N5GQgFUvkRtS4aAmMFEALw_wcB

 

Context Presentation 10

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Lisa Ko’s novel The Leavers, is a domestic fiction coming of age story that follows the life of a young boy name Deming Guo.  His mother Polly is an undocumented Chinese immigrant.  The story starts out with Deming when he was with his mother.  He lived in China with family while his mother was in the United States working to have him come live with her.  They lived in New York and she was not very happy with her work.  She found work in Florida and decided that they must move there.  He did not want to move, and the next day his mother went to work and never returned.  He is told that she it away visiting friends but felt that something wasn’t right.

In New York alone there is over 160,000 undocumented Asian immigrants, as stated from the Center for Migration Studies.  This represents about 1 out of 7 Asian immigrants in the state which is about 14%, and about 1 out of 5 undocumented immigrants in the state which is about 21%.  These are big numbers when considering how many people live in the state of New York.  In the United States there is an estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants living here, and out of that 11.5 million, 1.3 million are from Asia.  Considering that there is about 18 million Asian Americans in the country, 1.3 million of them being undocumented is a huge scale of representation.  While they make up big numbers in our systems of being undocumented, they are often left out of the debate on immigration.  The research on these communities is very sparse.  The answers to many of the basic questions like, are they just overstaying tourist or work visas or is there other reasons behind it, are left unanswered.

Deming is a young boy who was abandoned by his mother.  He was left with so many questions unanswered.  This inevitably changed his identity.  He was left to worry for himself.  Undocumented Asian Americans make up a pretty hefty percentage of the Asian American population as a whole.  They are also left to fend for themselves.  It is very easy for them to get exploited in fear of getting deported.  They are stuck living in fear, with few options of finding work or places to live.

Not just a Latino issue: Undocumented Asians in America. Asia Society. (n.d.). Retrieved October 26, 2021, from https://asiasociety.org/northern-california/not-just-latino-issue-undocumented-asians-america.

Data on undocumented Asian Americans. AAPI Data. (2020, January 30). Retrieved October 26, 2021, from https://aapidata.com/undocumented/.

Williams, V. (2021, October 26). ‘you feel invisible’: How America’s fastest-growing immigrant group is being left out of the DACA conversation. The Washington Post. Retrieved October 26, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/09/08/an-asian-daca-recipient-reminds-us-that-not-all-immigrant-families-are-from-south-of-the-u-s-border/.