Author: Maggie

This photo was taken in June of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement and the rioting which led businesses to put wooden boards up to protect their glass windows and doors. Shortly after the riotings, I walked past a store with this spray-painted on and it struck out to me with all the colors. I increased the contrast on this picture to make the colors stand out more since it is an important part of the message. The color scheme would appeal to a large group of people and is very attention-grabbing. I believe this message was to show support to the LGBTQ+ community in a very chaotic time.

I chose to use strategy number 3 because I think no matter how many times I reread my own paper I wouldn’t find an issue with it unless it was pointed out by someone else. After receiving my feedback from my partner, I read through my paper once again to see if  I noticed the concerns that my partner bought up such as adding more quotes and connecting it back to the film. I kept this in mind while I was editing and writing my new draft, which was really helpful and I also found some new sources connect back.

1) Reed connects the “retrenchment period” at CUNY and the Covid-19 pandemic by relating a number of socio-economic factors. The retrenchment period led to a massive rise in tuition and exploited adjunct professors. Similarly, because of Covid-19, 3000 CUNY adjuncts have been laid off, as well as many campus workers, leaving them without health care. The exploitation of adjuncts has manifested in a more modern form. CUNY is also hoarding federal CARES Act money that could have been used to rehire these workers. Additionally, “1 in 2 CUNY students already food-and housing-insecure now suffer increased unemployment and danger of eviction” (Reed). During both the “entrenchment period” and the Covid-19 pandemic, CUNY dealt with its financial trouble by taking it out on its students and faculty.

2)  Members of

 the Latinx Student Alliance organization at Lehman College sent a letter to the Dean of the English Department demanding more diversity in the curriculum. The students stated that kids at Lehman needed to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, for positive reinforcement, and also to help them believe that they can also become authors. They also asked that minority groups not be categorized into curriculum sections. The Latinx Student Alliance (LSA) essentially asked that Lehman treat Latinx students the same as the rest of the student body instead of only teaching British-focused literature courses and treating marginalized identity as a subtopic. Representation is very important, when students of color see members of their community as respected and scholarly, they are undoubtedly inclined to believe that they can also be regarded as such.

3) Reed suggests that anti-racist and anti-austerity groups at CUNY use a diverse range of tactics to bring in broader layers of participation. 

People can decide at which level they no longer wish to engage. The CUNY administration and political elite must be persuaded to address CUNY-related issues on multiple fronts, which means that a diversity of tactics makes sense. That being said, this does mean that white teachers should force a discussion on and engagement with race because it can undermine genuine political discourse and anti-racist accomplishments. The labor movement has recently implemented “Bargaining for the Common Good,” in which the Chicago teachers union made multiple demands. This might be an effective strategy. CUNY has not embraced this bargaining sense and still fails to represent anti-racist goals.

The piece I am choosing to write about is the movie adaption of “The Hate U Give”, a movie directed by George Tillman Jr. in 2018. The movie is based on the infamous novel written by Angie Thomas, in which Starr Carter, a Black teenager caught between the two worlds of her mostly Black neighborhood and white prep school, witnesses the murder of her childhood best friend.

The film depicts themes of identity, race, police brutality, and other intersecting factors that encapsulate Starr Carter’s identity as a Black woman. She is torn between not acting “Black enough” at home, and acting “too Black” at her white prep school. However, her entire world and the facades she creates are shattered when she witnesses her childhood best friend being murdered by police. She questions morality, the foundation of the universe, and everything in-between.

I chose this movie because I feel that it connects cultural, political, social, and spiritual themes in a very cohesive way. Police brutality is a huge theme in our current climate, especially considering the BLM movement and the outbreak of protests in June of 2020. That movement is linked to the Black identity which is linked to themes of spirituality, such as connection to the church, and also linked to cultural norms that are unique to the Black community. I feel that there are a lot of important social and cultural constructs I am able to comment on within this movie adaptation.

The “Hate U Give” is a powerful commentary on how police brutality uniquely affects the Black communities livelihood and ability to navigate the social and political climate. The movie also explores how this targeted attack on Black lives can affect mental health and relationships..

• How does this piece’s rhetorical properties contribute to its meaning? (think blending of image/ text, tone, audience, color, design, etc) 

The piece that I chose is “Pandemic Haiku” by Greg Bordowitz. It accurately represents how everyone felt when the COVID pandemic first started. Each Haiku represents a period of time during the pandemic that each reader can viscerally recall. The poem also embodies how the pandemic continued to drag on and eventually altered our perception and meaning of time. The way Bordowitz chose to organize his paper was also very interesting because most of the pages are empty and do not contain many words. I believe he did this to reflect how there were not that many things happening during the early stages of the pandemic which felt very isolating. The tone seems to be reminiscent and reflective, but also deeply sad and disheartened. The piece uses multiple rhetorical properties to give the audience an insight into how life was during the pandemic.

• How does the text resonate with social or political concerns of the present?

This text resonates with the social concerns of the present because everyone has experienced the instances Greg Bordowitz is describing; we all sat in our homes and watched the seasons pass, we all went to get the vaccine when it was released, and some of us chose not to, which created controversy. Because we are still in the pandemic, the Haiku’s also represent how everyone is still trying to slowly get back on their feet and recover from the lockdown. We are all trying to find a new “normal” despite the fact that it seems like things will never be how they once were. 

• What conclusions can you draw from this text to build an argument for what impact art might make on political or social concerns?

Art is an abstract medium that enables authors to convey feelings, emotions, and desires without having to present their thoughts in a conventional way. Especially in the case of a Haiku, it forces Bordowitz to include only the most relevant words and events. Despite his simple language, he is able to make us recall lived experiences that we all shared. His Haikus are reminiscent of the desperation we have all felt for answers, the hopelessness we endured as seasons dissolved into the air, and the human urge to still find meaning and life in the most mundane of times. Bordowitz’s collection of Haikus is written and formatted like the physical embodiment of time passing. Often, politics becomes polarized to an extent that everyone must pick a side, everyone must choose their version of right and wrong; art enables commentary and bias without polarization.

As I am reading through my first draft to fill out my sentence revision form, I realize that I use a lot of commas in my writing and that I have a lot of long run-on sentences or choppy sentences because I use too many commas. This wasn’t really surprising to me because long run-on sentences have always been an issue for me. I think this happened because this was my very first draft so I was just trying to get down all my ideas onto the paper instead of being worried about if it makes sense and I also definitely did not read over it to make sure that it made sense. I was also a little surprised because I am never too confident in my writing so I was expecting a lot of wonky, weird, and hard-to-read sentences but to my surprise, I was faced with a lot fewer mistakes than I was expecting. This would help me make more changes in my draft by taking out unnecessary words, commas and cutting down some of my run-on sentences, and incorporating more simple style structured sentences into my writing as it would help me get the main idea of the paper to the reader in a clearer and easier way. These changes would help enhance my writing by making my point come across better on better and help me get straight to the point rather than a lengthy and wordy piece of paper.

After reading both articles, Racial Capitalocene by Francoise Vergès and New York’s Invisible Climate Migrants by Sophie Kasakove, it made me realize that race has everything to do with the community and environment that someone lives in. Minorities tend to live in communities with worse conditions because of financial problems. 

In the article, “Racial Capitalocene,” by Francoise Vergès, it states, “It showed that race was the single most important factor in determining where toxic waste facilities were sited in the United States and that the siting of these facilities in communities of color was the intentional result of local, state, and federal land-use policies.” This shows that toxic waste facilities are used as another tool for fueling systemic racism and inequality bc it is undesirable to have a toxic waste facility in your neighborhood for obvious reasons which means the burden falls on POC communities local, state, and federal land-use policies directly police POC communities by building toxic waste facilities in their neighborhoods this systemic inequality is also seen in food deserts and quality of grocery stores available to POC communities as well as unequal access to quality education

The article, “New York’s Invisible Climate Migrants,” Sophie Kasakove, states, “In the Rockaways, in Queens, and Brooklyn’s Canarsie, the median asking rent is $1,837 and $2,000, respectively, compared with an overall median of $2,199 in Queens and $2,500 in Brooklyn, according to StreetEasy. They are some of the only places where homeownership is attainable for middle-class families, particularly for black families: In 2017, in Canarsie and neighboring Flatlands, 62 percent of the population identified as black and the homeownership rate was 57 percent, the highest of any neighborhood in Brooklyn.” This shows POC residents are typically forced into unsafe, unfavorable neighborhoods bc the rent is lower and therefore more accessible even though it is more dangerous.

Both of these articles continue to show ways of how minorities are forced into bad living environments and communities because they can not afford anything better since it is way out of the price range.

 

After facing an economic crisis in the 1960s that caused residents to lose faith in the city government’s ability to provide, people came to rely more heavily on private volunteerism and partnership with private businesses. In the late 1980s, Mayor Ed Koch solidified the presence of the private sector and market in the political and economic governance of New York. 

One aspect that I’d like to focus on is how neoliberalism has led to gentrification. There is an undeniable link between the rapid transformation of dilapidated neighborhoods and market forces, specifically the real estate market. Poorer residents have been displaced by increases in rent in an effort to make real estate in the city more competitive and luxurious, rather than provide affordable housing. The goal of neoliberalism is to replace existing infrastructure with newer infrastructure that can generate more revenue. I have seen this in my neighborhood as smaller businesses are replaced with chains because they cannot pay the increased rent, and I’ve noticed it in general as NYC becomes full of expensive high-rise buildings that barely reflect the NYC of the early 1960s and 70s. Standardized testing is one field that has been prioritized at the expense of students. Standardized tests, made by private companies, reward students for achieving high school and sort them into categories based on their perceived intelligence. Because of this, many schools have abandoned meaningful teaching due to the stress of making sure their students perform well on standardized tests. I experienced this firsthand in high school when I was taught a basic core curriculum that barely skimmed the surface of many important concepts to make sure that I was prepared for the tests coming at the end of the year. This relates to Dickinson’s text as the example of gentrification, caused the lower class to be displaced because they could not afford to continue living there which shows how the government just keeps taking away every little thing that the lower class may have for themselves.