Author: priest.631

Text review assignment: Little Fires Everywhere

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The text I would like to examine is the Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Although this story was originated from a book, I have never read the book and would therefore like to speak on the Hulu original series. This show is about two mothers of different races who have extremely different parenting styles. Elena, portrayed by Reese Witherspoon, is a wealthy white mom who struggles with one of her daughters being lesbian and another one of her daughters dating a black man. Elena likes to be seen as perfect and having it all together so when her daughters do something that she perceives as imperfect, she tries to protect her own image instead of caring for her child. Meanwhile, Mia, portrayed by Kerry Washington, cares for her daughter in a different way and ends up supporting Elena’s daughter better than Elena does.

While watching this show, I can’t help but think of Hegel’s master slave dialect. I think about how the master would not be the master without the slave so in a certain sense, the slave is the master of the master. In Little Fires Everywhere, Elena likes to think that she is the master of the whole town of Shaker Heights. However, when Mia and her daughter move in, Elena is challenged and Mia makes Elena know that she has a lot less power than she thinks she has. It starts with Mia questioning her parenting and then turns into her children and husband rebelling over her. Elena loses her power. The people she had power over (slaves) began to rule her.

This story shows a lot of inequality including race and sexuality. It shows how people have a set perspective and highlights microaggressions that many people watching the show are guilty of. It shows that listening, sympathy, and understanding are the keys to understanding people different of yourself and we can see how that starts to change Elena… until her house burns down.

I watched this show with my parents while we were stuck in quarantine and it brought up a lot of conversations about race and sexuality that we had never had before. This show proves that many systemic thoughts of inequality stem from our neighborhoods and families. Did this show bring up any conversation with your family or friends about racist microagression and other inequalities in your hometowns?

Week 13 Context Presentation: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

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We have all learned about the morning of September 11, 2001 and how it changed everything about life in America. However, many of these history lessons fail to mention the personal impact on Muslim Americans and the discrimination they faced and continue to face to this day the attacks on 9/11. Abu-Ras, an associate editor of the Journal of Muslim Mental Health, mentions that Muslim Americans were triply traumatized. First, by the attack, which everyone in America was traumatized by, second, by the attacks they personally received from the American population and third, by the policies created by the government that specifically targeted Arab Americans (Mekouar).

The government created about 20 policies implementing anti-terrorist initiatives and 15 of these explicitly targeted Arabs and Muslims living in America. For example, the summer after the attacks, all men from certain Arab and Muslim countries were required to be fingerprinted and questioned to investigate if they were a part of the attacks. Not one result came back with a correlation. The government also put most Muslim-owned businesses under surveillance which also concluded with no correlation to the attacks. Harsh surveillance and intended trauma could be considered hate crimes which Muslim Americans experienced a rise of by nearly 500% from the year 2000 to 2010 (Kumar). This staggering statistic does not include many incidents of personal attacks these Americans experienced in their schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces.

It has been two decades since the 9/11 attacks and many Muslim Americans have to continue to fight for their identity. In the story we are reading this week, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, we learn about Changez, the main character who is a pristine Pakistani man. He was living his dream working at an incredible financial firm in New York but after the 9/11 attacks, he experienced hate and discrimination like never before. The first step towards equality is education and Mohsin Hamid takes a step towards change by sharing Changez story.

 

Dandia, Asad, et al. “What It Meant to Be Muslim in America after 9/11.” NPR, NPR, 9 Sept. 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/09/1035578745/what-it-meant-to-be-muslim-in-america-after-9-11.

Mariam Fam, Deepti Hajela. “Two Decades after 9/11, Muslim Americans Still Fighting Bias.” AP NEWS, Associated Press, 7 Sept. 2021, https://apnews.com/article/September-11-Muslim-Americans-93f97dd9219c25371428f4268a2b33b4.

Mekouar, Dora. “How 9/11 Changed Arab and Muslim Americans.” VOA, How 9/11 Changed Arab and Muslim Americans, 21 Sept. 2021, https://www.voanews.com/a/6222700.html.

Diary of Systemic Injustice – Hostile Architecture

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Unfortunately, due to a reason unbeknownst to me, the article I did my first Diary of Systemic Injustice on was since deleted. That particular article described the use of hostile architecture in our neighborhood of downtown Columbus, OH. This article interviewed a homeless man upset about being misplaced so often. Robert Campbell, a homeless man in Columbus, mentioned “everybody is willing to tell me to move; nobody is really clear on where I should be”.

From this perspective of a homeless neighbor, it drew me to think about the architecture I am surrounded by and how it affects me, and the people around me. I was drawn to recognize the benches that have “armrests” scattered across the bench which is just a tactic to break up the bench so someone can’t sleep on it. Small details of architecture like this drew me to dive deeper into the systemic injustice against men and women without homes and the reasons behind it.

Andrea Lo, a CNN writer, dove into an interview between James Furzer who is an architect who tries to combat hostile architecture, and Dean Harvey who is the Co-Founder of a big company that produces many of the hostile pieces of architecture. Through these conversations, both professionals agree on many things such as the definition of Hostile architecture which is “where architectural elements and the public realm are used to control human behavior” but they also disagree on many motives of architecture.

You can see hostile architecture looking through the structures from centuries ago. It can be traced back to the late 1700s where during the Georgian era, many walls and fences were seen with spikes to protect from someone trying to break in. Arguably, this motive is justifiable for the protection of others. But does a homeless person sitting on a windowsill really put anyone in danger?

Many pieces of hostile architecture are later put on the structure after seeing someone sleeping on a bench or a group of people looking for shelter congregating under a parking garage. In these cases, it is clear that the system of officials and architectural authority wants these types of people out of sight. Homeless men and women can often be seen as adopting the subaltern role because other people are consistently making decisions for them such as where they sleep and where they congregate, and they are not given space to plead for their dignity.

Furzer fights for our homeless neighbors by saying “But if we’re excluding (the homeless) from sleeping on benches, then we need to include them somewhere else.” It is empowering knowing that people are expressing the same concerns as our homeless neighbor Robert Campbell that I had the honor of learning about earlier this semester. If we stop looking for opportunities to misplace them rather than looking for opportunities to include them, the homeless rates will drastically improve.

Decker, Theodore. “Theodore Decker: ‘Hostile Architecture’ Reduces Seating for Homeless Panhandlers.” The Columbus    Dispatch, 15 Oct. 2019, www.dispatch.com/news/20191015/theodore-decker-hostile-architecture-reduces-seating-for-homeless-panhandlers. 

Lo, Andrea. “The debate: Is hostile architecture designing people — and nature — out of cities?.” CNN, 21 Dec. 2017, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/new-dean-harvey-james-furzer-hostile-architecture-debate/index.html.