For Project 1, I chose America Ruined My Name For Me due to help back up some of the claims I made in my essay as the article was extremely strong and shared different experiences of discrimination behind race and ethnicity. One annotation that I highlighted was categorized in a Challenge, “Bich, a Vietnamese name, given to me in Saigon, where I was born and where the name is quite ordinary,” (Page 1), where I wrote “We have this stigma around people’s names that if they don’t sound “American” people will automatically assume that someone is different.” Due to this assumption, we’ve created a toxic and challenging environment for us to live in, creating a stigma that we should have names that sound like the stereotypical Sally or Tom.
In Project 2, Devon Price’s “Empathy is Overrated”: “Our culture is obsessed with the power of empathy. Whenever a politician strips a marginalized group of their rights, the left decries the lack of empathy. When hate groups rise up and spout vitriol, their apparent lack of empathy is blamed as the root of their evil. Even critiques of capitalism somehow become conversations about empathy. It’s as if people believe the most pressing problem is the lack of love in billionaires’ hearts, not the systems of power and capitalism that made them billionaires.”
With this example, Price shares how our culture is obsessed with the power of empathy and how we’re constantly almost fighting for something to be resolved.
Frank Bruni’s “Doctors Said I Might Go Blind. It Helped Me See More Clearly.” as it gave real-life examples of something that had happened to an individual. For example, “There’s almost always a discrepancy between how people appear to us and what they’re experiencing; between their public gloss and private mess…” or “single parent, a child with special needs, nowhere near enough help.” A woman I know would be dealing with that, and her acquaintances would rightly find her ability to hold down a full-time job and her unflagging professionalism in it not just admirable but heroic. They’d instantly forgive her any tiny lapses of memory, any fleeting impatience, because they’d understand what a miracle it was the lapses were only time and the impatience merely fleeting.”
“Daniel Baston’s “Empathy and Attitudes: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Improve Feelings Toward the Group?” “The strategy used is to induce the audience to feel empathy for one or a few members of the stigmatized group. By empathy we mean an other-oriented emotional response congruent with another’s perceived welfare; if the other is oppressed or in need, empathic feelings include sympathy, compassion, tenderness, and the like (see Batson, 1991)”
With this quote, Baston is explaining how the strategy of empathy is used to feel sorrow for a stigmatized group. For example, can we feel empathy for a said stigmatized group like individuals with mental illnesses?
Again, in project 2, Empathy is Overrated, by Devon Price, Price shares, “Empathic people feel sad when other people are sad. When you witness someone getting punched, empathy might make your own brain light up with pain. It’s almost like having psychic abilities. Right?” I think this quote shares a side of empathy that I don’t think is exactly correct, and it is almost a stereotype of what people categorize empathy as. “…empathy might make your own brain light up with pain. It’s almost like having psychic abilities…” But this doesn’t seem right, Price is asserting that empathy isn’t described or portrayed in the way of feeling something physically that someone else is going through. It’s the emotional understanding of what another is going through, putting your shoes into theirs, and supporting one when and if they’re going through a rough patch.
In project 3, the article “Unfollow” by Adrian Chen, shares Megan Phelps-Roper’s experience with the Westboro Baptist Church and how her life was based on contact with the people around her. Her family was influenced by the church, and then the views were passed to her, creating an overwhelmingly toxic community group.
In project 3, in the opinion article “Dignity in Disabled Lives” by Andrew Solomon he shares a quote about how there are stigmas around families raising children with disabilities and people almost making assumptions about how hard it may be.
WRAP-UP REFLECTION:
Throughout this class, I’ve found I have grown in a multitude of different areas, writing stronger papers, annotating more critically, and even improving on how to create a strong Works Cited page. On another hand, when I read some of the articles we were assigned, I find that I can engage better in some, but others not so much. For example, if one article was longer or if it was very wordy, I would find myself becoming distracted or even losing where I had just read. An example of the reading I found to be a little out of my understatement was the scientific articles we read, although I believe a lot of my peers would also struggle with this type of article. On another note, one reading I thoroughly enjoyed would be the article about Megan Phelps-Roper’s life and everything that she went through and reading about all the controversy within the article. Overall, I believe I’ve grown in one way or another throughout this class.
