Social Justice Week

I found Hillards observation on names ascribed to black people by Europeans to be very interesting. His observation was that the name being ascribed to African Americans are all adjectives as opposed to proper nouns. He states that those adjectives are “words that suggest no respect for who we are or for our uniqueness as an ethnic family.” I really liked the fact that he brought this up because it can make people who favor the term “nigga” see it in a different light. It really upsets me when Black people say that we “adopted” the word and therefore are allowed to use it as a word of empowerment. There is no consensus among society that the word is now positive. I’m going to use Mike’s story as an example because he brought it up in class. When the black guy hit him and he was telling the story to his friends, he called the guy a nigger to emphasize his anger and negativity. The point I am trying to make is that the definition for the word is not universal, whether it’s spelled with an “er” or an “a”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BTsSswufs0

I thought this video was pretty interesting. It related to our topic in the fact that they talked about hegemony. This video goes into depth about racism and is not just limited to blacks and whites. They demonstrate that there are multiple forms of oppression. They talk about the Aborigines during white settlement and how Australians purposely introduced diseases to lower the population.