In the Tarzan movie we witness him trying to assimilate into the culture he’s been taken in by. His parents were killed when he was a baby, and the apes took him in. He grows thinking he is an ape that looks different from others. There is no questioning the fact that the apes have treated him with love and have not once treated them differently.However, he struggles with the Alpha Ape because he does not accept him, and in the clip above we see him observing himself and upset because he looks so different and that is why he isn’t being accepted by Kerchak ( Alpha ape). So when the mud jumps on his face he notices that he is brown and that is the color of the apes. So he tries to cover himself in the mud to look more like them. He was displaces in that culture because of the excessive differences between him and others. Throughout the movie he tries to fit in and show Kerchak that he is worth his recognition and acceptance.

So at some point in the movie, Tarzan finds out that he isn’t an ape and is actually human. So Jane the woman who introduces him into the human culture, is the one that shows him how a human male is supposed to act like. And then he tries to fit in into that culture. In the clip above we see him trying to act like a human, and assimilating into that culture.

In the movie, Bring it On All or Nothing, Britney is displaced by moving into a new neighborhood and attending high school there. Britney was from a wealthy predominantly white neighborhood. She is not used to the argot in this high school. She was extremely popular and respected in her old high school as cheer captain and when she arrived at her new high school she was displaced. It was a totally different environment from her, she was not accepted and was referred to as “White Girl” and she stood out like a sore thumb. Britney was not used to the variety of races; most important races of color. She did not know how to interact with her new classmates. She was displaced from her old privileged white high school. In addition, she didn’t have any of her cheer friends to support her like she did in her old high school. It was a drastic change for Britney in her environment, academics, and social groups. She was not accepted from most of her classmates and her classmates thought she was bougie since she looked like a stereotypical white girl that obviously did not belong; as her classmates phrased it “she’s lost”. She did not feel like she belonged and neither was she immediately accepted into the high school.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcqNOzfHCvs

In the show, Shameless created by Paul Abbott, one of the main character’s Lip was uninterested in attending college after finishing high school. Lip lived on the South Side of Chicago which was one of the toughest neighborhoods in the country. However, despite those woes, he earned a 4.6 GPA throughout high school and even went as far as offering students to take their SATs as a source of income. Lip’s girlfriend, Mandy saw his potential and applied him to colleges throughout the country without him knowing. However, when he started to receive college acceptance letters, he was angry and upset at her. A man from MIT showed up in front of his door step to interview him. Initially, Lip tried blowing him off, but then the man said that he wouldn’t have made it anyway. Consequently, Lip proved him wrong after writing an incredible essay in front of the man and a few months later was accepted to MIT.  In his first party at MIT, he tried to pick up a girl similar to the way he did back in the South Side, but got flipped off. After having a rough time adjusting to MIT, Lip thought of calling college a quits and just living content with the lifestyle everyone in his neighborhood lived. His friend was disappointed in his left turn decision and tried to snap him out of it. I see Lip’s displacement at MIT conform to the models we saw in class because he feels like the “fish out of water” at MIT as he doesn’t know how to interact with people outside of the South Side and isn’t familiar with people who doesn’t deal with the same issues he deals with at home.

Today in class, we watched three short clips from Superman, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. All three clips follow roughly the same basic structure. In the first two, the son is sent away from home by his parents and finds himself in a new and unfamiliar place.  In the third, Kimmy emerges from her captivity into a strange and unfamiliar world.  In all three narratives, the protagonist has to figure out how to manage in a place where he/she does not fit in. Your homework for Tuesday is to find a piece of popular culture that follows this basic “fish out of water” structure. It could be a tv show, movie, song, video, cartoon, etc…. All that the designation “popular culture” means is that is it designed for a mass audience. Once you’ve chosen your “text,” post a short, representative clip from it or a link to it here on the blog, together with a description of the text and an explanation of how you see it conforming to the model we saw in Superman The Fresh Prince, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. If you have any questions about this assignment, please contact me.

Your selection must be posted to the blog (as an independent post) before class on Tuesday in order to receive credit.

My two best friends and I spent a lot of time together during our last year of high school. We didn’t have a lot of classes together, but we still managed to stay close and spend time together almost everyday after school. I enjoyed spending time with them because there was always laughter and we never ran out of things to do and talk about. However, it all started to change when we started college. Since they both go to the same college, I was the one who was separated from them. In the beginning we still communicated in our group chat just like the way we always did. It made me feel better because I still felt like I belonged and that they haven’t forgotten about me. Due to the time differences in our schedules, I barely spent time with them because one of us is always busy with something. However, they spent a lot of time with each other since they had similar schedules and were in the same college with no one else that they knew. Even though we still continued communicating in our group chat, they often talked about stuff they could relate to and about the people they met in their classes. Although they didn’t mean to make me feel left out, I felt displaced because I couldn’t contribute to the conversation or relate to any of it. When we hung out during break, I still felt displaced because they often left me out of the conversation and talked about things that were happening in their college. They even had inside jokes that they would later explain to me. Even though I felt displaced, there are still moments where I felt like I belonged, especially when we bring up high school memories and caught up with each other’s lives.

This is a photograph of a five-year-old boy who survived an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria. He was buried alive and pulled out what was left of his home. He was then left in the back of an ambulance, bloody and confused about what was going on. His name is Omar Daqneesh and as you analyze this video of him after being rescued(Boy in Ambulance Rescue), you will notice how calm and lost he is during the situation and it will just make you sad. This five-year-old boy has nothing to do with the Syrian Civil War, but has to deal with the daily destruction, bombings, and terror that goes on in his country. His family is all scrambled under a home that was bombed and everything around him is a disaster. A war that he has no part in, but is being victimized. His facial expressions and silence just say it all. You cannot help, but think of things that were possibly going through his head.
“Where are my parents?”
“Where are my siblings?”
“What exactly happened?”
“What happened to our home?”…
Omar along with tons of other innocent children and innocent families are displaced and helpless. They are forced to reckon with the current situations of their countries until matters get better. It just makes me realize how fortunate and lucky we all are with our living standards in America. While we are all here continuing to pursue our dreams and receive an education, Omar along with so many innocents are fighting to survive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/nyregion/cuomos-1-4-billion-plan-in-brooklyn-stirs-fears-of-gentrification.html?_r=0

While reading this article, I realized that this subject of ‘gentrification’, has played a huge role into the theme of displacement. Governor Cuomo plans to fund $1.4 million towards healthcare services and job opportunites in central Brookyln. However, many residents fear that gentrification might occur because of the more healthier resources and jobs.  As many New Yorkers have known, Brooklyn has become the place of gentrification and as a result, many Blacks and Latinos have been forced to move out of the area. More importantly, the culture itself of the “hood”, dies. Looking at the issue more carefully, racism factors into this topic repeatedly. In the article, a resident states “If you want to make it better for the community, why 2017? The community has been the way it has been since the ’70s,” implying that, for years, Brownsville has been ignored and now that gentrifcation is booming, all of a sudden Brooklyn became the place for development. A majority of balcks and latinos mostly reside in this area and because rents will soon rise, due to the housing development, many of them will be forced to move: “But where’s everybody else going to go? Down south? Where are we going to go?” Whenever a large population of minorities are being undermined, especially in this case with the rent issue, their only other option is to move somewhere else where their socioeconomic status benefits them.

SARAH MASLIN NIR, “Cuomo’s $1.4 Billion Plan for Brooklyn Stirs Fears Of Gentrification” NYTimes.com 

Most of my closest friends are Latina.  We get along extremely well and I love each of them. We laugh together, cry together and burst into spontaneous musical theater numbers together.  Most of the time I fit right in, and I forget that we come from different ethnicities. Then moments happen like what I experienced during our recent get together. During the middle of tell a story one of my friends said something in Spanish that made everyone in the group laugh, except for me of course because I don’t speak Spanish. As usual, in this situation I just sat, waiting for the laughter to die down and for some one to explain it to me. Whenever this situation arises my connection with my closest friends feels as though it is beginning to shrivel away. I can’t relate to their laughter and instantly feel as though I don’t belong in this friend group. Many times I would hate myself for not learning Spanish in middle and high school, and I would wish that I was born into a Spanish speaking family. In a matter of seconds, I went from feeling like I belonged to feeling so displaced I just wanted to get up and leave (which sometimes I actually did when I first started feeling this displacement). Displacement is a feeling that can come at any moment of life; even when you are surrounded by people you love.

I think I might’ve had the worst transition from high school to college. My first semester at Baruch was definitely rough, but definitely something I learned from. When I began the semester I thought of it as a brand new and fresh start to the next chapter of my life. I wanted to start everything off on the right foot and I actually thought I was. I started to arrive at classes on time, taking advantage of a daily planner and simply began doing things I have never done before which also includes studying. Well at least I thought it was studying, it was more like read and forget, or take notes and never revise. To be quite honest, I actually didn’t know how to study, it was a skill I developed and learned how to do over the course of the semester.

I thought I was starting the semester strong and did really well, but in reality, I had a very slow start to the semester. I did poorly in my first four exams; four exams I thought I studied enough to do well in. It was rocky. I dropped a class because I didn’t have a chance of doing landing a good grade in it. I stuck by another class and ended up finishing the class on a strong note. I took advantage of having no homework and homework that was due at the end of the semester. I didn’t start my MathLab assignments until the last three weeks of the semester, and I got lucky to finish 98% of the homework assignments.

Even though I had a challenging start at Baruch, I think I’ve grown as a student and person in the past semester. The library and basketball court became my home. I started to take advantage of my learning and networking opportunities. I am happy to say that I am nowhere close to the student I used to be in high school. College makes high school seem like a walk in a park and though my transition was rough at first, I am continuing to improve everyday.

Transition from being with my friends everyday,from having to make new friends and spreading away from my same crew from high school was a very different hard experience for me .When I entered Baruch , I was very stubborn and promised myself I would not join anything I would stay to myself and go straight from school and home . I did this for about the first two weeks and I was not happy at all .I would call my friends and explain that this school sucks everyone is about their books and no one is friendly ,but it was really all me.The reason it was hard to make friends or join anything was because I did not want to step out of my comfort zone to know anyone .It felt strange to not be going to the same classes with the same people Monday through Friday .Taking the boat to school by myself,riding the train back by myself I thought it was making me a loner and weak ,but instead it was only making me stronger and I found out more about myself then I ever did within last semester .I realized I am a very social person and love to communicate with others so why not go and start fresh with networking .That is what Baruch is all about networking and meeting new people so that is what I did .It was hard at first because I was shy.As soon as I steeped out of my comfort zone all opportunities began to come my way.I made friends with classmates ,club mates ,and even people in tutoring .Getting out my comfort zone saved me and it allowed me to feel more confident and comfortable with myself although it wasn’t an easy task and beat it even though there were obstacles in the way.Change is not always a bad thing it actually just allows you to view what was actually hidden inside which in my case was opportunity .