Author: taylor.3817

Text Review Assignment – Lauren Taylor

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For this review, I chose to look at the Netflix docuseries Wild Wild Country. This docuseries was recommended to me by many people, and I’m so glad I made some time to watch it. Wild Wild Country is the story of a controversial, spiritual guru, whose passionate followers congregated in search of a more fulfilling life. The spiritual guru was named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and his ‘followers’ were called Rajneeshees. Bhagwan’s community began in India, but the group quickly outgrew its sanctuary nestled in the middle of a bustling, urban environment. When this happened, Bhagwan relocated his ashram from India to the tiny town of Antelope, Oregon in the early 1980s. 

Rajneeshees were not quite religious followers, rather, they looked to Bhagwan for guidance and advice for how they should live their life. Bhagwan’s philosophy was centered around meditation, inclusivity, acceptance and promoted modern ideas about other social and political issues. They demonstrated unity as a group through living together, working together and even wearing color coordinated clothes. Though these people had comed from all over the world, practiced different faiths, had different life experiences and stories, they found a sense of home and peace together.

Everything was going wonderfully for this group until they made their journey to the United States in search for a bigger future together. The town of Antelope is like many small, remote towns in the United States in that politically, ethnically, socially and religiously it lacks diversity. It was a town where everybody knew everybody, and the majority of the population just wanted to live out their retirement years in peace and quiet. The overarching motif of this whole docuseries to me seemed to be a continuous struggle for power and control; whether that was control over the “Other”, control of their own lives or some other meaningful thing in their lives. The Rajneeshees had numbers, but the citizens of Antelope had the home field advantage.

When the Rajneeshees arrived in Antelope, they brought with them ideologies, values, religions and ethnicities that were completely foreign to the people who called this place their home. Rajneeshees believed in exploring sexuality, and incorporated physical touch into a lot of the time they spent together. This is a pretty stark contrast to what the older, traditional, conservative people of Antelope valued. The citizens of Antelope, Oregon all went to the same single church in town, and saw spirituality and religion as synonymous things. When you compare that to the Rajneeshee belief that having faith and being spiritual are two very separate things, it is just another clear difference between the groups. In just about every way possible, the people of Antelope and the Rajneeshees disagreed and butted heads. Ultimately, I think the townspeople of Antelope felt threatened by the newcomers and some of their actions. This perceived threat to their lifestyle and security paved a long road ahead for conflict between the citizens of Antelope and Rajneeshees.

Throughout the docuseries, I was able to identify concepts we have studied and found the docuseries to be even more fascinating with the perspective I have gained. Most obviously is the theory of the One versus Other. The docuseries captures personal narratives from both sides of this conflict, and it is interesting to see how each side makes themselves the One, and designates the opponent as the Other. I also found parallels in the experiences of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Judith Ortiz Cofer, who knew they were in a country that was founded on the idea of freedom and tolerance, yet received neither. 

I won’t get into how this whole debacle ends since it’s an absolute rollercoaster that every person should encounter in its entirety. I definitely felt throughout the series I had no clear side that I felt I could root for, and I believe that is exactly what producers intended. This story made it really difficult for there to be a winner and a loser, a good guy and a bad one; this is much more reflective of conflicts in real life. This docuseries wonderfully demonstrates the importance of avoiding a single-story narrative. More than anything, I feel that this docuseries inspires a conversation about what people really value in life, and all that they are willing to do and sacrifice to achieve it. All in all, I would strongly recommend watching this docuseries, and encourage any one who watches it to do so in a critical way considering all that we have studied this semester.

“Yo, Is This Sexist?” – Lauren Taylor

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Transcript:

Hey, what’s up? My name is Lauren Taylor, and this is my podcast: Yo, is this sexist? This topic is one that is very important to me. So, I’m super excited to share my thoughts and hear yours as well about this. So yeah, let’s get started.

In one of my diary of systemic injustice entries I wrote about something I had witnessed on the vice presidential debate with Pence and Harris. And as I’m sure many people observed, Vice President Pence talked over and cut off vice president, President Elect Harris numerous times, and it went on until Harris finally pushed back and kind of reestablished her position as a speaker, she was just like, ‘hey, *insert pissed off smile here* I’m speaking’. I believe that action, that assertion, struck a chord in the hearts of many American women, including me.

The main reason this kind of this interaction between the two of them really caught my attention is because I worked in a hardware store for over two years in high school. And I worked my way up from scrubbing down the toilets, and cleaning the popcorn machine, to being the youngest ever shift manager and the only woman to ever hold that role in the store. And every day, I demonstrated my knowledge and my skills and despite that, I had customers continuously, and coworkers too, dismissing me and doubting the work that I would do. So some customers, like wouldn’t even let me try and help them. I had some that just explicitly asked, you know, “is there a man I can talk to?” Like what? like, this is the 21st century, and people still say that? It’s just kind of crazy to me. I just, I wanted to be given a chance. And I don’t, I don’t know everything there is to know but I do know quite a bit. And I’m really eager to learn about what i what i don’t know as much about. So I kind of just began to think that this was a problem in that particular retail environment, because, you know, in a hardware store, there’s a certain demographic of people that come in with more outdated views. So you’re going to see and experiences kind of interactions more. And, you know, to their credit, I was pretty young, my parents didn’t even trust me to have my own credit card at that point. So why should somebody trust me with repairs around their house or updates in their house? So I get it. I mean, that’s, that was me trying to justify it, and make sense of it all because it, it was really, really frustrating, and really hurtful, I think.

But, um, once I got to college, and I was closely following this election, and other American politics and news, I began to realize that this is a problem that is much bigger than just old dudes in my local hardware store. A woman can be overly qualified and skilled for a role that she’s competing for or performing in, and she will still be met with criticism and unfounded judgments no matter how high or low on the ladder she is. And I just, I wonder, why is that? You know, I, I just can’t, I can’t wrap my head around it. It doesn’t make much sense to me. So through the readings and concepts you’ve explored so far, this semester, I really tried to look for some half decent explanations and while none of them served as justification, I do believe a lot of them, a lot of the pieces we’ve read, can help explain and lay out what’s truly happening and kind of on a subconscious level.

Um, so if you if you look back in time, sexism like a lot of other social issues was just explicitly clear. Women didn’t have basic human rights, and it’s no doubt that we’ve made tremendous progress over the last 100 years, like insane amount of progress. That being said, most of the issues that perpetuate sexism go beyond laws and legal issues. You know, they’re, they’re cultural, and they’re systemically enforced, and I think that makes them a lot harder to combat and change. So many people, they’ve been raised, you know, both men and women have been raised to accept the idea that men are above women are every way. And they de Beauvoir in the Second Sex outlines this very well. She, she states that “otherness is a category of human thought,” and she also explores different aspects that force women to be submissive and accepting of male sovereignty. Usually, people are taught to think this way through socialization, and how they’re raised by their parents, which makes it a really hard thing to stop because it can be passed on from generation to generation, and, yeah, it’s just, it’s really, really hard to stop. So if we look through the lens of Hegel’s master-slave dynamic, and the, the one versus the other, we can find a more abstract way to approach the issue of sexism. And almost all cases of sexism, women are seen as the other as the slave, to the one or the Master Man. Sometimes, as Hegel points out, the roles of master and slave switch, but unfortunately, in the case of sexism, the scale is disproportionately tipped in favor of men being the master while women must remain submissive. Both Hegel and de Beauvoir seem to suggest that this categorization that humans experience and place on one another is primitive, and hardwired into our brains. I think even if that is the case, it doesn’t mean it’s accurate. And it also doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to reform and improve.

In my time, at the local hardware store, I was objectified in addition to the experiences I mentioned before. I had customers tell me that my uniforms needed to be tighter. I had one particular instance where a customer refused to leave the store without my phone number. I had another customer invite me to his invite me and give me the address to his unnamed, unmarked “jewelry store” in his basement. And I talked about these things with my coworkers and with my bosses and like, ‘you know, this is going on, is it just me like, what do I do when customers are creepy?’, and only the women in the store have experienced similar things. And it makes me think a lot about Ortiz-Cofer’s the story of my body. The community I grew up in was not very ethnically, racially, economically diverse in any way. It was mostly white, upper middle class, upper class neighborhood, and because of this, i’ve never, I probably never will have to experience the same discrimination that Ortiz did, as a minority in a big city, but the objectification of her body and the way she was always kind of seen in this sexual lens by others, mostly men, around her is something, is an experience that I definitely I share with her. And objectification is a form of sexism that brings a different, a different type of pain when it’s experienced. Over the years, it’s something that I’ve observed and I’ve become more aware of, and it’s experienced by women, both in high powerful positions and by women who are, you know, frequently forgotten, forgotten by most of society. So, I guess all that goes to show that whether you agree with Kamala Harris’s policies and views or not, um, I think it’s clear to see that she is a powerful, smart woman. And I, like many other American men and women can’t wait to see what follows having not only the first woman but having the first woman of color be in the White House. Sexism isn’t a political issue. Women have all sorts of backgrounds and beliefs experience it daily.

For far too long, the same type of people who would dismiss me in the hardware store and, you know, doubt my abilities are the same types of people who hold office and reinforce the injustices that women face. And I truly believe that American women are ready for change, and we are more than capable of succeeding in our efforts for it. Yeah, I just, I think it’s gone on for far too long, and like I said, we are ready for change, and I think I think we’ll get there. Thanks so much for listening! Bye.

Systemic Injustice Showcase-Lauren Taylor

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Last Thursday, my roommate and I made our weekly 11pm trip to Sloopy’s to grab some mac and cheese to bring back to our dorm to devour while watching Jeopardy. It is something we both look forward to all week, and the trek down to south campus is filled with lots of chatting and laughing. This past Thursday though, something happened that reminded me of all that is occurring outside of my life on campus. 

As we walked across the Oval and were approaching Sloopy’s, we saw a young African American man practicing skateboarding and different tricks in the privacy of the darkness. My roommate and I walked by when two white police officers patrolling on bikes rode past us going towards the man on the skateboard. I am not quick to assume things about others or their intentions, but I just had this icky feeling about it. Why did the officers bike past me and my roommate, without even making eye contact, but rode right up to a guy practicing kickflips? I know my roommate and I probably don’t come across as bad characters, but the guy skateboarding did absolutely nothing that would raise concern. My roommate also saw what was happening, and felt the same concern that I did, so we decided to hang around until the police officers were done talking to the man. This got me thinking, what exactly made the police officer see me, a small, young, white woman, as a non threatening individual while an African American man listening to music and skateboarding is worth stopping and questioning? Are they trained to just make those judgements based on race or gender? Is it cultural? Is it learned through socialization?

From what I could find, it seems to be a combination of all of those things. Which I guess explains why it is so difficult to address these problems–they exist and perpetuate through so many streams in our society. This issue is very applicable to our exploration of the Slave-Master dynamic, as well as the existence of the “Other”. In one specific study I looked into, they found “white officers of this study actively select minorities for enforcement purposes, or they ‘amalgamate,’ blacks over whites because minorities simply do not appear to respect the officers’ interpretations of the white social order,”. That sentence terrifies me. This study also found that “the white officers have ‘cognitively modeled’ minority culture as socially inferior to their majority culture. Accordingly, the white officers socially learned to view African American people as people of inherently bad character… They were trained and were socially reinforced by peers and mentors that minorities were by nature prone to criminal activity and worthy of selective police interventions.” I think this specific study shows how systemic of a problem profiling by the police can be. 

I’ve grown up in a time where police violence is a horrific and common problem, but it breaks my heart that seeing those officers approach the man on the skateboard made my stomach churn, fearing what may transpire, what could escalate, all for nothing. I cannot even imagine what would need to change for interactions like this to never occur. But I do know people are beginning to open their eyes, look out for each other, and fight for change, and I think that is a really solid place to start.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/criminal_justice/publications/criminal-justice-magazine/2020/winter/racial-profiling-past-present-and-future/

https://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2696&context=aerc

 

Week 3 Context Research Presentation-Jim Crow Laws and Civil Rights Activists

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Lauren Taylor

COMPSTD 1100

September 5, 2020

Hi, my name is Lauren and my pronouns are she/her/hers. Today I will be talking about the collision of Jim Crow laws and civil rights activists prior to and leading up to the civil rights movement.

Jim Crow laws are a topic covered in practically every history class in modern America. However, most classes seem to focus solely on Jim Crow laws in the 1950s-60s with the Civil Rights movement. Before doing research of my own, I didn’t fully understand all that led up and fueled the civil rights movement of the mid 20th century. In this context research project, I will highlight and identify some well known, and some not-so-well-known, history that is imperative to keep in mind as we approach this next week of reading. 

The exact starting point of Jim Crow laws is debated, but in general, most agree that the laws came about following the Civil War (in the mid-late 1800s) and ended around the time of the Fair Housing Act in the late 1960s. So there was nearly 100 years of this “racial caste system”[5] in the US following centuries of brutal slavery. This is a long time for tensions to build, violence to be executed and innocent lives to be lost

When the civil rights movement is taught in school, curriculums seem to focus on a select group of individuals to study such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Rosa Parks. While these individuals are incredible to learn about, there were some less well known African Americans that were resisting and advocating for change long before these prominent figures. Ida B. Wells, for example, was a “prominent activist against Jim Crow laws after refusing to leave a first-class train car designated for white people only.”[1] In 1889, Wells “became the co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and used her position to take on school segregation and sexual harassment.”[1] In addition, Wells traveled throughout the United States writing about her findings in lynching investigations.[1] Another important figure to note is Charlotte Hawkins Brown. After funding was withdrawn for the school she taught at around 1901, “Brown became the first black woman to create a black school in North Carolina and through her education work became a fierce and vocal opponent of Jim Crow laws.”[1] 

African Americans resisted the Black Codes from the time they were enacted after the Civil War. Those who defied “the segregation and disenfranchisement laws”[2] knew that it could cost them their lives. For decades prior to the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, there were increasingly violent race riots, frequent lynchings and overall unrest and conflict. For example, The Red Summer of 1919 had violent race riots in more than three dozen cities across America that resulted in hundreds of deaths[1,4]. There was not a single aspect of life spared from Jim Crow laws, and that was by design. Whether it was media, schools or public facilities[1,2,5], African Americans were constantly reminded of how they were perceived by white Americans–as “second class citizens”[5].

There were some famous court cases and proposed legislation that eventually led to the end of Jim Crow laws in the 1960s. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) “upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation for public facilities as long as the facilities were ‘equal in quality’”[3]. Unsurprisingly, facilities were almost never equal in quality or cleanliness. In the landmark court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), “the Supreme Court ruled that educational segregation was unconstitutional, bringing an end to the era of ‘separate-but-equal’ education[1]. Following Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act were passed after years of opposition and negotiation. These acts effectively ended Jim Crow laws, but the issue of racism in America is still, about 60 years later, far from over. 

 

Works Cited

  1. History.com Editors. “Jim Crow Laws.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 28 Feb. 2018, www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws.
  2. “Jim Crow Laws.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedom-riders-jim-crow-laws/.
  3. “Plessy v. Ferguson.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Aug. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson.
  4. “Red Summer.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Aug. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Summer.
  5. “What Was Jim Crow.” What Was Jim Crow – Jim Crow Museum – Ferris State University, www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm.