Just posting a reminder that your first drafts of your Textual Analysis Essay are due tomorrow, Wednesday, November 2nd. Please bring three copies of your draft with you to class. No excuses!!! (And remember – a rough or unfinished draft is a million times better than no draft at all!). Email me if you have questions. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow!

• The first step in writing the Textual Analysis essay is selecting the text you want to write about. Once you have made your choice, go to our shared Textual Analysis Pre-Write Document. Scroll down until you find a page that has not been filled in and use it to record your early thoughts about the text that you have selected.
• We will be working on our essays in class together on Monday. For class, you will need to have a hard copy of the essay you are writing about. You will also need to have either a pen/pencil and paper or a laptop/tablet. Please annotate your hard copy before you come to class, marking quotations that you think are significant and making notes in the margin with your own questions and observations.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/latinos-vastly-underrepresented-in-media-new-report-finds

What this article is discussing is the lack of representation of Latinos in the media, in the article it talks about how whoever Latinos are shown in the media they are portrayed as these criminals. “Castro says the lack of accurate representation, especially in Hollywood, means at the very best that Americans don’t get a full understanding of Latinos and their contributions. At worst — especially when Latinos are solely portrayed as drug dealers or criminals — it invites politicians to exploit negative stereotypes for political gain, Castro said.” This is something that needs to be addressed because Latinos are being stereotyped as these drug lords and people only laugh about it and gas the idea up.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/viral-video-trevor-noah-shreds-racists-over-comments-on-rishi-sunak-3462459

Trevor Noah played a clip from a British radio show in which a caller explained why a non-white person becoming the PM of the UK is not a good thing. “Can you imagine me becoming Prime Minister of Pakistan? People of England would like to see someone who looks like them,” the caller said.

It doesn’t matter where you come from because he won that election fairly. He became Britain’s first Prime Minister of Indian descent. A lot of people show hate because he isn’t England’s ideal white-washed prime minister rather than looking at the things he managed to accomplish during his time in office.

This is an article about Kanye West and his problematic history 

Recently Kanye West got cancelled (term used on the internet which means to stop supporting online figures) for making Anti Semitic and racist comments on his social media platforms. He also recently lost his partnership with the brand Adidas.

One thing that I found interesting about this situation is that there are many caucasian celebrities that have made similar comments as Kanye, but still have tons of fans that support them every day. Kanye on the other hand, as a person of color, receives a huge amount of hate as soon as those words were said by him.

This is a link to an article about celebrities accused of black fishing: https://www.insider.com/celebrities-blackfishing-accusations-racially-ambiguous?amp

Blackfishing is a term used to describe people who are not Black, trying to “pass off” as Black. This type of representation bothers me because instead of letting Black artists have the spotlight, non-Black artists take it away 

I chose this video because its about Washington Heights which is where I grew up. The whole movie is supposed to depict what being from there is from but the clip I chose in particular capture that everyone has a dream and has a pressure to be a hard worker. Many people want to work their way back to a good life in the Dominican Republic and some use the fact that they came from so far away that they can’t allow themselves to slack off.

The video I have selected is a scene from a Disney show called “Jessie.” It aired between 2011-2015, so I would have been in elementary school during its run. The show focuses on the titular character, an 18 year old nanny to a rich white couple’s four children (three of whom are adopted). Among the adoptees was an eleven year old boy named Ravi, who was adopted from India fairly recently and was taking time to adjust to life as an American. This aspect of him is not inherently wrong to represent; however, the showrunners decided it would be a better course of action to turn him into a caricature of South Asians. As with any Disney character, he was treated as comedic relief (specifically as the butt of most jokes), yet it came at the expense of his culture. There were jokes about his accent, his cultural attire, Hinduism, and the way he obviously wasn’t “American” enough. At some point, it starts to become very apparent that he was the joke of the show.

Some other things that bothered me about his character:
– His actor (Karan Brar) has an American accent but Disney hired an accent coach to help him sound more stereotypically Indian.
– Ravi wasn’t even supposed to be a character. If I recall correctly, Karan Brar auditioned to be another character (Luke), and the casting directors liked his enthusiasm but they did not see him as fit for Luke’s character. Instead, they made a new character (Ravi) and assigned him to it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWpc99HFOs0

To add context to the clip, this episode focused on Ravi navigating his way through his first day of public school. In this scene, three things are apparent: he is very tied to his Indian heritage, he has a very thick accent, and he has been learning English for some time. This already shows how his culture is about to be played for laughs, and that is exactly what happens as the two white characters in the scene (Jessie and Luke) make ridiculing comments about Ravi’s significant traditional garb both to his face and behind his back.

I picked the big bang theory since it was a show I’d watch as a kid when nothing else was on. Upon seeing random clips of the show, I noticed this fascination the rest of the character, who are all white, have with mocking raj, the only Indian character in the main cast. They belittle him and make fun of everything he does at every turn. They also bother him a lot. An example of this would be in an episode after raj and Amy (another character in the show ) sleeps together with another character and compare interracial sex to bestiality. Which was Season 5 Episode 1 i cant find any clips of it.