Post 2

I am still reading the book Kasher in the Rye by Moshe Kasher.  He is about twelve years old at this point is has no friends.  He is looking for social acceptance since he is currently an outcast.  He turns to smoking and stealing cigarettes from the local food mart.  He then starts hanging out with older boys who also smoke cigarettes.  They then start hazing him and making him do horrible things in order to gain their acceptance.  "Every P.A.G. initiation ritual I went through was somehow deemed insufficient afterward and then they'd ask me to perform some other pain ritual or sexual humiliation in order to be acepted in."  (Kasher 59)  This can be related to alot of people who go into college wanting to be accepted.  Someone joins a fraternitiy because they want to be accepted by people but then they have to do painful and humiliating things to themselves.  Do you really want to be accepted by people who justt want to see you get hurt? Also Moshe smokes weed for the first time.  "I smoked and smoked and every hit chipped away another part of my life...puff puff... gone were my worries."  (Kasher 62)  People think that smoking weed will just make all of your troubles go away.  People use marijuana as an escape from reality, but not all of the long term effects of weed are known.  I find that this book is very interesting.  Even though I don't have a hard a troublesome life like Moshe does, there are some parts of this book that I can relate to.

New book

For my outside reading I am reading the book Kasher In the Rye, by Moshe Kasher.  This book is the story of Moshe Kasher a young troubled boy from Oakland, California.  At this poing in the story we have found out all about his family.  Both his parents are deaf and he, his mom, and his big brother ran away from their father at around age 4 because he was abusive.  We also learn that Moshe has anger management issues and must see a therapist.  "Six-year-old therapy looked like this: Ruben would hand me a Nerf sword and I would beat him as savagely as I could around the legs, buttocks, and genitalia." (Kasher 12)  Moshe would attack people, even complete strangers, this became so bad that his mother had to put him on a leash everytime they went out.  Also while he was a baby, Moshe drank a bottle of his mothers perfume and had to be taken to the hospital, which can easily be assumed that it is foreshadowing what is soon to come.   This book is kind of slow in the beginning but later on it starts to pick up with drug use and more violence.  I am really excited to keep reading this book.

Trayvon Martin case

Lately I have been hearing a lot about the Trayvon Martin case in the news.  But I didnt really know what had happend.  Reading the Rolling Stone article gave me a lot more information.  Supposedly George Zimmerman was acting in self defense by killing Trayvon Martin, and his actions are protected by Floridas Stand Your Ground law, which lets you more or less kill someone if it is an act of self defense.  George Zimmerman said that Trayvon Martin had come up to his car while he was in it.  But somethings don't add up, why would a teenager say to someone "you're going to die now" while in a brawl with that person.  But Zimmerman supposedly suffered from a broken nose and a scratch on his forehead from the fight with Trayvon. 
George Zimmerman was just charged with Second Degree Murder yesterday.  The maximum penalty if found guilty is life in prison.  I believe that if what George Zimmerman says holds up to be true in court, I think that he will be found innocent.  But right now he is one of America's most hated men, and even if he is found innocent I dont't think he will ever really be able to return back into normal society.  I also feel that the community is making a bigger deal out of this than they really should just because Zimmerman is white and hispanic.  Obviously killing someone is a big deal, but when a black person kills a black person, it doesn't become national news, I think that people like Jesse Jackson are just trying to start a race war, because someone who isn't black killed someone who is black.

Affirmative Action

I do think that colleges should use affirmative action.  I think that the diversity of schools should be much bigger.  It seems that most great schools are usually all white, with Asians being a close second.  "At the University of Michigan, Jennifer Gratz decided to sue the school (and ultimately won) because the year she was rejected, around a hundred blacks, Latinos, and American Indian students were admitted despit having lower test scores and grades than her." (Wise 75)  I personally admire the University of Michigan for admitting minorities over some white students in ordder to gain more diversity.  I wouldn't want to go to an all white school because I would want to go to a school with more than just white people.  I don't think that a school should be allowed to get sued just because they admitted someone who has lower test scores than someone else.  A university should be able to admit whoever they want to.  When you bring in more minorities, the minorities can bring more to the table than a bunch of white people, I do not mean that in a racist way, I mean it in a way that white people generally have it easier that minorities, since a lot of minorities live in the inner-city, and have it a lot harder than us.  In order for a minority to succeed, they must try a lot harder, because they usually do not have the same amount or quality of resources that we do here in a place like Deerfield.  Overall, I do think that race should play a part in the admissions process at colleges.

Wrongful Convictions

After reading going to the wrongful convictions website and listening to Terril Swift speak to us in class, I have a better understanding on just how much people are wrongfully convicted.  Terril Swift was obviously an innocent man, but police detained him for so long that he confessed to the rape and murder of a woman.  It seemed that the police used illegal ways to make Terril confess to the crime.  Terill didn't know his rights so he signed the confession.  Terill served seventeen years in prison, until DNA evidence showed that he was not the killer of the woman.  Terill told us that it's practically impossible to make a living while a sex offender.  I don't know why the state of Illinois would classify him as a sex offender even after he was proven innocent.  I don't know if the police officers who treated Terill so badly did it because of his race or what, but they should be prosecuted for forcing him to confess.  I think that DNA evidence is very helpful and should be used no matter what, in every case.

Denial

              I read the chapter on denial, this chapter goes into detail of how white america denies the fact that there is still racism in the USA. Many whites believe that when the blacks got their civil rights, racism somehow ended automatically.  This, sadly is not the case, racism is  still out in America.  Another topic of this chapter is about the myth of reverse racism.  Whenever a white person doesn't get a job because they were competing against a black person, they say it's because they need to get more black people working for them to increase diversity.  At the University of Michigan, a white girl sued the university because about 100 blacks, Latinos, and American Indians who had lower grades and test scores were admitted while she was not.  She even won the case.  But also about 1000 white people with lower grades and tests scores were also admitted.  The article tells us hat what we think is racism against us is really just coincidence and others just being better at some things.
             Another part of this chapter is looking back on when the author traveled to give an anti-racism speech at a college outside Twin Cities, Minnesota.  When he got there the author asked three white liberals about racism on campus, they told him there was no racism on campus or anywhere in Minnesota.  The author then talked to blacks, Latinos, and American Indians, and as he thought, there was racism not only on campus, but in Minnesota.  There are no places with racism, racism will always be in America. 
              Personally I think that whites know that there is racism in America and they just either don't want to admit it, or they don't admit it in hopes that will hide the racism.  Everybody has slight stereotypes that they may even be unaware of, and therse stereotypes will never go away.  Racism will always be denied by whites, because they just don't want to believe that we havent gotten over things that began 500 years ago.

Response to the article on Forbes

I do agree with this post.  The key to being succesful is getting good grades.  There aren't too many succesful people that didn't get good grades.  Mostly everyone who got good grades tried hard.  Another way to be succesful is to try where others fail.  The resources for inner city kids are not always there, a way to help inner city kids is to give them the resources they need in order to be succesful, such as a library or teen youth center.  I think that for someone to do all the things the author of this article said he would do is highly unlikely.  He mentions using skype and other online services, the odds of being a poor kid with a computer camera to video chat or skype with other people is unlikely.  I do agree with the author on somethings but I feel like he just shouldn't talk about this unless he has been in the situation of being a poor black kid.  Because obviously if everyone knew all they needed to do was get good grades to be succesful  they would all do it, but there usually is something else that plays into the mix that prevents them from being succesful.
After reading the responses, I completly agree with some of the stuff they said.  What is the difference between being a poor white kid than being a poor black kid, the resources aren't there for either.  Its not as easy as just going to the library studying, and getting good grades.  I also agree that the author shouldn't have even written that article, it is just going to start a lot of contraversy that doesn't need to be started, it just sound ignorant of him to be talking about that kind of stuff because he has no idea what it would be like to be a poor black kid.