When I first read the final project assignment, I had a lot of thinking to do. Many issues are important to me, but which one could I talk about in narrative story form stemming from my own experiences with these issues? I couldn’t discuss any of them because not one issue directly and forcefully impacts my life and to write about that would be ingenuine.

SO, after deciding that I’m living in a historical time period that may never happen again, I decided to do a piece on my experience during COVID-19. The group I’m speaking back to is the quarantine-resistant protestors.

My mom is a nurse in the pediatric same-day recovery unit at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. Her unit, luckily, is not an “essential” unit, so she’s only been pulled to help with COVID patients one time. Before she was a nurse in the same-day unit, though, she was an emergency room nurse on the pediatric side for 15 years and a pediatric ICU nurse for five years, so she’s seen some dark sh*t. She’s been pulled three times since quarantine to work in the adult ICU because all of their nurses are in the COVID unit.

After my mom was pulled to the COVID unit, she had to undergo isolation for 14 days and my dad, sister, and I were quarantined in the house for those 14 days as well. My mom was isolated in the garage with no access to any of us for those two weeks. We had to FaceTime her from one floor above.

Those two weeks were really hard on my family, and to see people protesting the stay-at-home orders, including my own family, further prolonging the pandemic is sickening (no pun intended). As I feel I can best express myself through photography and writing, I’m going to tell my family’s story with a photo-journal essay.

All this time of the pandemic I’ve been waiting to do “my part.” I wasn’t good at making masks, I can’t go to help my grandparents or other elderly in my community, and I can’t go volunteer anywhere because my mom’s job puts us at a greater risk of spreading the virus. If I can use my skills to somehow contribute to writing history, I’m going to do it (and so I can complete the assignment, of course 😉 ).

In Lynette Adkins’ YouTube video, “Being Black at a PWI | UT,” she interviews different black students that attend the University of Texas about their experiences finding community on campus. What we know and what we assume about Lynette as the author of the piece are different, though.

In the video, Lynette doesn’t once state that she herself identifies as a black person or that she is even a student at University of Texas. We can’t even deduce that fact from the video’s description, only from her profile picture, and even that is an assumption. We can make the assumption that Lynette is a black student at UT based off of a few context clues:

1. The students she is interviewing seem comfortable speaking to her about their experiences being black at the university and they may not be as comfortable if she were white.

2. When she is interviewing Shalom, Lynette comments at the end that “it’s very awkward” in response to Shalom mentioning race being brought up in classes, which seems to be a comment based on her own experiences.

3. White people may be less inclined to make this video in the first place because they can’t speak to the experience.

This is how we, as viewers, assume Lynette to be a black student at UT, but we never find out for sure, which ties into her purpose of the piece overall. In the piece, Lynette isn’t sharing her own experiences or telling her story but is giving other black students the platform to share their stories. This highlights the issue in a stronger way because there are multiple students experiencing the same issue and experiencing it from different perspectives, like being both LGBTQ+ and black, biracial, or “token” black. The purpose of this piece is to tell hidden stories to the rest of the UT community because, as Christian says, “African-Americans are only 2% of the population [there].”

Which is the perfect segue to the question “who is the audience of this piece?” The audience, from my perspective, is the university minus the black population. The video opens by Terrane stating that “people keep on talking about how Austin is a really liberal place and it’s really diverse, but it’s not,” and the key word in this statement that lines up the rest of the video is “people.” Who are the people that say Austin is diverse and liberal? In this context, Terrane is likely talking about white students and the predominantly-white administration because, with the black population being less than 2% at UT, the white people are the ones that see a few black people or people of color and have the privilege to call the city/university “diverse.”

YouTube was the most successful platform for this type of story because it gives faces to the stories Lynette is trying to tell. By clipping together each interview, she morphs these separate stories into one narrative, which is exactly the point. She’s trying to say that these few black people on campus have different lives, but are coming together in this video to form one story: it’s difficult for black people to find their place at a predominantly-white institution.

Aja Martinez’s allegory tells a different resistance story than the ones we have read up to this point. Besides the fact that she’s resistance-writing fictionally, the main player is assimilationist. Rosette Benitez doesn’t fit the mold of “oppressed speaking out against the oppressor.” In fact, she almost becomes the oppressor by trying to breakout from the oppressed.

Early on, we learn that Rosette resisted her traditional Mexican-American culture in Arizona by distancing herself from her multi-cultural family after receiving a private-school education and living with a white family. Her mindset is clarified when she says, “her cousin simply didn’t understand the value and necessity of assimilation and its importance for getting ahead in life” (pg. 5). In a way, though, is she wrong?

We – as in liberals — don’t like to swallow the idea of assimilation as a success tactic because it negates the “American melting pot” ideal and associates more with the conservative “white American Dream” ideal. However, had Rosette not lived with the white family, attended private school, rejected her family’s culture and formed her own “white” life outside of her Chican@ heritage, would she have become a successful scientist? Would she have had the same opportunities had she not assimilated to white culture? Rosette even makes that claim, thinking, “they had every opportunity I had” about her cousins. But did they?

And yet, even with all her professional success and assimilationist motivation, her heritage follows her into a Capitol Hill Boardroom, where she’s confronted by a racist, nationalist, and (likely) sexist senator named Russell Borne, the perfect symbol of the stereotypical American South. It’s not until the end of the story that Rosette realizes she can’t escape her heritage and her race will always place her lower on the totem pole, regardless of perceived “success.”

Martinez’s allegory is an example of storytelling as a kind of resistance because Rosette represents a storyline that may be familiar to people like her and digestible to people who are not. At points in this story, I even found myself (a socially-liberal moderate) rooting for her assimilationist practices because it seemed to bring her success. If this is the way to equal opportunity, maybe she should be trying to “fit in” (don’t worry, I only thought that for .2 seconds).

The point: even though this multicultural scientist from Arizona did everything she could to achieve “The American Dream,” she realized too late that this “dream” was made for/by white nationalist slave-owners. It’s resistance-writing because I, the reader, want Rosette to succeed, but she cannot because of the societal barriers created by people of my skin color. In trying to resist the oppressor she suppresses her culture, but she realizes too late the toll it will take on her family, and familial ties is a theme everyone can understand.

Source:

Martinez, Aja Y. (2013, August 7). Critical race theory counterstory as allegory: A rhetorical trope to raise awareness about Arizona’s ban on ethnic studies. Across the Disciplines, 10(3). Retrieved from
https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/race/martinez.cfm

But I was unable to acknowledge, grasp, or grapple with what I was experiencing, for both my parents and my teachers had suggested that, if I were a good student, such interference would and should not take place.

Minzhan Lu, From Silence to Words, pg. 443

This quote, sourced from deep within the text, encompasses the overall theme of the work: Lu’s identity in this narrative is student in every one of her environments, and she was being taught conflicting lessons while being expected to reconcile them. This task, obviously, is too much to ask of any adult, let alone a sponge-like child. Lu’s experience allowed her to become a critical reader and writer in her later years, but taught her isolation as a child.

Lu faced a struggle larger than conflicting political ideologies, such as anti-revolution versus revolution. Lu’s struggle was of trying to unify a completely different culture with that of her home country’s, stripping her of the right to choose her ideals both at home and in school.

Many children struggle with this separation between home and school, especially immigrant children who enter the United States. In a way, Lu was like an immigrant in her home country. She spoke a different language and had a fully opposite way of living at home than that at school, and the home culture, or “language,” as she says, she had never experienced first-hand, only academically. She was almost being forced to assimilate to two opposing cultures, inciting the struggle.

“Through the metaphor of the survival tool,” she writes, “my parents and teachers had led me to assume I could automatically reproduce the official stance of the discourse I used.” This quote proves that she never had the chance to formulate her own stances and opinions as a child or young adult because she spent her energy trying to be two cultures at once. Who should a child reject, her parents or her teachers? The answer should be neither, they shouldn’t have to choose, but Lu wasn’t awarded that liberty.

Towards the end of this passage, we see that this childhood struggle pervaded into her adult life as a parent, when she says she worries that the use of language as a “survival tool” will silence her daughter later on in her academic career. She worries the same for her students, but her ending quote perfectly describes her new perspective on teaching her writing class:

“Don’t teach them to ‘survive’ the whirlpool of crosscurrents by avoiding it. Use the classroom to moderate the currents. Moderate the currents, but teach them from the beginning to struggle,” proving that, while her struggle was a struggle, the skills she derived from it, literacy, purposeful discourse, and resilience, may have outweighed the negatives.

I grew up very privileged. I went to a $30,000 per year private school in Central Jersey for all 15 years of my pre-college education and was expected not to do anything but succeed and go on to college. With that in mind, I started studying the English language at age three through reading assignments for homework – with my parents, of course – and language assessments. I was always considered a strong reader and started reading two grades above grade level starting in first grade.

I come from a home with two white parents but one who grew up with black friends and assimilated to “black” language. I started using “ain’t” and “frontin’” at a young age, but never in the classroom because my white mother would correct it as “at home” language, just as some toys were “at home” toys. I’m sure she was protecting me from any racial issues being that I’m very white and those terms are typically associated with non-whites.

The way my schooling failed me in language education is reflected in Students Right to Their Own Language where the conference wrote, “differences in dialects derive from events in history of the communities using the language, not from supposed differences in intelligence or physiology.” [pg. 6] This is how private schooling from a young age can be most harmful: the superiority of intelligence. I, like most of my peers from that school, didn’t realize I had this complex until coming to college since I grew up with an intense, “proper” education. In college, I’ve realized that not everyone has learned the difference between “at home” language and “at school” language, which begs the question of “does this differentiation even exist?”

McClendon would say yes as his entire educational stance is that the professional world expects a certain amount of English-language literacy presentation that isn’t reflected in African American communities, or “at home.” The standards of public schooling, I assume, are different due to the masses of students and limited resources, so I do not blame either public school teachers, students, or public school parents for not teaching the difference between “at home” and “at school” language. If I had to argue myself, I would say that this differentiation doesn’t need to be taught, not anymore, at least, because the professionalism structure is reorganizing with the infiltration of young millennials and Generation Z.

My school, although privileged, was diverse. I never felt that I was sitting in a classroom of all white students. In fact, I typically sat in classrooms of mostly Asian and Indian students. As I grew through the school, I saw more changes than maybe any other student, and I noticed as more non-white students came in and brought their cultures with them. What we all had in common, though, was the way we spoke to teachers, wrote our essays, and presented in class. That is “at school” language, and that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

When looking at Zitkala-Sa’s “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and Richard Pratt’s “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” the common theme connecting the two pieces is civility vs. incivility. The core difference is who is considered civilized and who is considered uncivilized in each. I view the two narratives linearly, wherein the peoples discussed start off either as humans or animals, and, in the end, are transformed into the opposite.

In “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkala’Sa considers herself and the other young Native Americans to be civilized humans from the start, but Pratt considers them to be uncivilized from the start. We see this distinction through the ending line of “The Cutting of My Long Hair,” when Zitkala-Sa writes, “Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.” The word “now” is the key word in this transformation from civilized to uncivilized or, in other words, human to animal. She did not previously consider herself or her people to be animals, but since she was treated like one, she felt that she became one.

Richard Pratt’s narrative in “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” has a different starting point. He considers the Native Americans to be “animals” or “uncivilized” from birth, but then believes that white schooling can convert them into “humans” or “civilize” them.

“The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people, and because of our savage example and treatment of them. . . We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation, and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them.”

Pratt, Paragraph 8-9

In this quote we can see that Pratt only believed “English-speaking” white people, the colonizers, were civilized, and that it was their responsibility to civilize the Native Americans, “as they did the blacks.”

Another key distinction is how each author qualifies both groups as either “humans” or “animals.” Pratt’s view is that the Native Americans are uncivilized animals because they hadn’t been exposed to white education and assimilated into the colonized society. Zitkala-Sa’s view is that the white people are uncivilized animals because of the violence they expose her to during her schooling, like cutting her hair, throwing her around, dragging her across the floor, and holding her down. The commonality of why each author believes their people are civilized is because each group has culture, and those cultures create societies, and therefore civilizations. Where Zitkala-Sa is writing against Pratt’s work is in showing that culture of the Native Americans that Pratt never thought to consider or understand.

In these two passages, Freire explores the idea of what I’m calling “oppression acceptance and assimilation,” which combines two different phases of the oppressed’s experience with their oppressors.

At the beginning of the passage, Freire claims, “But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to be­ come oppressors, or ‘sub-oppressors.'” (45) In this, he is referring to the “promotional” phase of oppression, in which someone in the oppressed group may be promoted to a higher position, giving them a level of power over their previous class, but not enough power to oppress the oppressor. However, Freire now categorizes the person as an oppressor when he says, “The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors.” (45) This passage proves that Freire believes becoming an oppressor may be inevitable to the oppressed class.

An example of this phenomenon is seen in victims of sexual assault. According to invisiblechildren.org, “about 30% of abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children,” which perpetuates the cycle of abuse and proves Freire’s theory further.

The idea Freire presents is that oppressed people may not struggle against their oppression because that is the life they know and have come to survive in, whether it’s deemed acceptable by society or not. This is seen even further in the second passage and is most obvious in the quote, “their [the oppressed’s] perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression.” (45) While those outside this reality may be capable of seeing another, “better” way of life, those being oppressed aren’t necessarily aware they’re being oppressed and, for lack of a better term, accept the oppression.

“It is a rare peasant who, once “promoted” to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner him- self,” (46) says Freire, and fraternity hazing is the prime example of this issue. As a college student, without scientific backing, I know that when fraternity pledges experience hazing, they:

1. Won’t report it.
2. Will continue membership in the fraternity.
3. Will then participate in hazing new members as they become upperclassmen.

With scientific backing:

• 5% of all college students admit to being hazed
• 40% admit to knowing about hazing activities
• and 90% of the general public surveyed agreed that newcomers may be afraid to disagree

according to insidehazing.com.

The concept of oppression acceptance and assimilation, in summary, is best expressed in the final sentence of the passage, when Freire says, “during the initial stage of their [the oppressed’s] struggle the oppressed find in the oppressor their model of “manhood,” (46) and that is how the cycle of oppression continues. With this mindset, oppression is power, and power is manhood, and all humans strive for humanity, so oppressed people may become oppressors to achieve that.