I am sure by now my blog post is late but to honest I honestly have been a bit blocked. Like I am not sure what to write and to be realistic I over think too much. My family has been personally effected with the corona-virus not necessarily financially but with actually having it. And to be honest it can be something very scary. Because it is everywhere. I open my social media and all I see is go fund me pages and the crazy thing is that it is mostly minorities. I mean I am not saying other people don’t have it but I think is the minorities the one that is seeing it much harder.

We are people who don’t have the luxury to just stay home because we don’t have the means to survive. And some of them when they are even sick don’t have the means to go to the hospital because they don’t have insurance to get medications and have to pay everything cash. And lets not say the working conditions they work on. This is what it means to be an immigrant in American I guess. I guess I see on a daily basis what most don’t see and that has honestly made me see true colors.

I mean look at how people are protesting and we can say nothing because it is a right. Like I have been thinking should we have a limit or does being American really mean we can do whatever we want when we want. Or like Du Bois says “either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy America” . Are we too selfish?

For my project I have been thinking of doing like a college of everything being American means to me. To be continue.

I think that it is amazing how the human mind works. Since we discuss last class what the project was all about I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it. I would think and rethink. I would honestly carry with me a small notebook and just drop down ideas. But then I would change my mind real quick. I honestly was a bit confused on what I wanted to focus on and write about. I wanted to write about my American story but at the same time I wanted to write about everything going on right now. So I was a bit lost. But then yesterday I sat down with my family. We were all just face timing and talking about all that is going on. And then as I sat down and looked at them and listen to what they said something clicked in my head. We could say it was my aha moment. Everything that is going on right now is still all part of my story. Everything I see and everything my family is going through right now is still shaping us. So I decided to right my story. I think if my family did so many sacrifices for me to be right now where I am their story deserves to be told too. So so far I am still brainstorming. Hopefully I don’t change my mind. Until next time.

When I began my research on Du Bois I can honestly say that I though I knew everything I needed to know from him but boy was I wrong. This man has done what people in their whole life can only imagine. He brought so much pride to his African American community. He was not only the first African American to graduate from high school but he was also valedictorian. He was also the first African American who received a PhD. D from Harvard. Yes he did received a lot of help from his teacher in his early ages but I think this is where my dad says that perceiving counts. My dad has told me many times that you can be the smartest guy out here or have support and still not make it. But boy oh boy did this man not only took his opportunities but he ran with it. Man he was out of this world. But you know what is the craziest thing that he never forgot where he came from. Even though he had these opportunities present to himself at a young age he made sure that he helped his community out. He was a very busy man. I mean this man was involved in everything research, campaigns, books, organizations. You say the word and he probably was doing that too.

But you know he worked for it all, like we all do and have to do. He was a man that not only was right about his ideologies regarding double consciousness and the veil during his time but still until today. I think that is what captivated me more towards him. That in a way I can relate to him and how he felt in that moment. On how we feel like we are always be judged at, stared down at, and unprivileged because of how we look. And even though in a piece of paper is says that we are American we don’t seem to fit under that name or even feel it. Like he says we live in a world that it predominant white and because of that we are always going to be seen different and we are always going to be the minority. But he always fought for everyone until the last day of his life and that is something very selfless. This is the reason I chose him. And hope too that one day we can proudly say that we are not a country with a color line problem because boy that is getting tiresome.

As I was researching Du Bois I came across this video in YouTube called “I am Not Black, You are Not White” and it made me question so many things. Like the idea that we live in a world of labels. I feel like the guy talking is responding to himself after he takes out his “veil” or comes to his term of double consciousness. I mean maybe its just me and I have read too much of Du Bois ideologies.

In the video the narrator or the person talking ask “who would you be if the World never gave you a label ?, never gave you a box to check. And to that question I answer sincerely I don’t know. I mean we have been so used to world that lives by labels that picturing a world without labels seems unreal even in our imagined world. How crazy is that huh? He also says that “labels blinds us from seeing a person for who they are and instead we see them through the judgmental,prejudicial , artificial filters of who we think they are “. That right there is something that Du Bois always fought after and it is sad to say that we are still fighting for that today. I mean look at the President we have. Look at what people are doing to the Chinese communities after the corona-virus. Man it seems like we still don’t learn our lessons and all we see is history repeating itself. Down below i would be posting the link to my slides for W.E.B Du Bois.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FPECPNUc24CWj7aI5a5785YgyFCWk5vew4g1YNNlVdM/edit#slide=id.g73788d57f1_0_39

I guess my last answer and the only right way to close this blog is by asking :

who would you be if the World never gave you a label ?, never gave you a box to check.

When the Professor mention this activity at the beginning of the semester to tell you the truth I was so clueless of who I was going to choose. I mean a bunch of names came up. Even now. As I sat down I just wrote down name after name. At the beginning I was thinking about people from my Latin roots. I was thinking a lot about artist like singers because I feel like humans someway we always connect to them. I was thinking about like this guy named el RESIDENTE. He is a Puerto Rican singer who recently became an activist but I was convinced so much on it. I couldn’t really relate too many other people. I started thinking about English music then and then I though about a bunch of artist that represent what American actually stands for. I was honestly blocked. Then I though about writers. My favorite writer is Langston Hughes. For me his poems are so deep and sincere and the same time some are even dark. I sat down and though about were maybe his inspirations came from or even his ideas. Then I though about WEB Dubois . Dubois way of thinking to me is something way out of common. He thought in a deeper level and develop theories that were so real and personal. He develop the double conciseness theory that in that time he related only to the African Americans but I think that in today’s world it extents to every single person out here regardless of race. I think thats why I choose him. Because his theory could pertain to anyone and anyone can relate to it. At least I do. I think that if you look through a history book of America you can find something to identify to this theory. Each time will be someone from a different background. In a way I think I can relate to how he felt and I can put myself in his shoes. I think thats why choose him for this project.

Hearing the podcast of “Three Miles” and the way Melanie expresses herself took me back to a book I was reading for class it is called The Absolute True Diary Of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. This story has kinda the same concept of what is going on in the whole podcast. The main character of this book is Junior he is a preteen child who was born inside an Indigenous reservation. His people has always been treated in a inhuman way by society and that led them to live this unhappy where they didn’t believe in the idea of dreaming.

Junior is placed by society in a reservation where there is no way out and no way to
prosper or pursue one’s happiness because the purpose was to see them fail. The reservations, as Junior mentions, is a series of “broken dams and floods” (Alexie, pg.6) and “a poor –ass Spokane Indian Reservation” (Alexie, pg.7). This place that society puts them in made them believe that since they were Indigenous people and the minority that they were nothing, so they believe they were nothing either. Because the Junior and his family followed the rules of not getting out of the reservation and supporting the belief that society implanted on them that they were nothing, they
started to belief:
“But we reservation Indians don’t get to realize our dreams. We don’t get those chances.
Or choices. We are poor. That’s all we are. It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing that you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it”. It sounded like when she noticed that they didn’t have a library at the school in the Bronx “Another thing that was tormented to me was that we didn’t have a library and I love books. Wow we really are in a poor part of the Bronx were we are not being consider”. (21:22)

This quote to me stood out also because it remind me of what Melanie said about how she felt when she walked into that school and saw how it was and she felt “I didn’t belong there. I had no business .. okay this is not free, this is not available for people of color. This is something for only privilege or the elite could have”(25:00).

Furthermore I believe that both this people in a way feel like society has taken something away from them. They have not only oppressed them but they have also made them feel that in worthless and out of place when they arrive in a place that they too deserve. It has also made them both feel that in order for them to make their dreams come true they must step out of their homes and if they do they feel out of place. Like Alexie said “. I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream”.

As I read “Sweetness “ by Toni Morrison there is a word that keeps standing out to me “mulatto”. In every single one of my English classes, this word has come out some way or somehow. This word is always correlated with a person always be lost within themselves or a person being unhappy with their life. A mulatto is a person who is a person of mixed white and black ancestry, especially a person with one white and one black parent. Once you learn what this word means you somehow begin to understand why people feel this type of way and why back then it was really somehow hard to be them. You begin somehow to find a correlation among all of them.

The first time I came across this word is when we were studying Langston Hughes. Hughes was an important African American writer during the Renaissance. He himself was a mulatto child. When reading his work you always had that sense of lostness or someone who was conflicted within himself. Some African Americans even tried to say that he was writing more towards the whites then his own people. A famous poem of him is even named “Mulatto”. In this poem, he writes about biracial children.  In this poem, Hughes throughout the poem states that he is neither white nor black because one doesn’t accept as well as the other. Giving us a sense of being lost.

 The second time that I heard this word was in a literature text Quicksand by Nella Larsen. In this novel, we are presented with a biracial character named Helga who throughout the whole book navigates all over the country and world to find herself. She gets lost in between being white and black. She neither wanted to be too white or too black. So this book takes us through her journey. A journey where she is trying to her true self and happiness. But she couldn’t find it. She stated 

 “Night fell, while Helga Crane in the rushing swiftness of a roaring elevated train sat numb. It was as if all the bogies and goblins that had beset her unloved, unloving, and unhappy childhood had come to life with tenfold power to hurt and frighten”.

When I came to this quote I was brought back to” Sweetness” by Toni Morison. In a way, I feel like because Luna’s mother was being like this to her, she herself will someone feel this way. She will forever question why her mother treated her this way and why she looked like this and not her mother. But in a way, I feel like to can’t blame her mother for the way she treated her daughter because I feel like her mother herself being a mulatto didn’t know who she was and what she stands for. She herself was a lost soul. Like how can you raise someone to love and accept yourself if you yourself don’t know that. I mean she even told the story about her mother passing as a white person. 

The way the mother prepared her daughter to face the world she would live in reminded me of this book called “The Hate you Give” by Angie Thomas. In this book, you have an African- American family who lives in a community where they are always surrounded by gangs and violence. His father taught his children at a young age the rights they have as Americans and what to do if they get stopped by a policeman. It is a good book of racial profiling and the injustice you seem to get just by the way you look. 

In a way I wan to see Sweetness as a mother who wants to show and protect her daughter from a target she has on her back the second she is born.

Upon watching the documentary “The Cats of Mirikitani,” I have concluded that being born in this country and being a citizen does not guarantee you or anyone else the rights you deserve but rather the way you look. The second-generation Americans will always be seen differently because of the way we look. Second- generations Americans have been suffering from racial profiling for centuries. We World War with the Japanese, with the Indians after September 11, with African Americans today, and with Hispanics since Donald Trump became president. It is an ongoing cycle that keeps repeating itself and even as Jimmy stated in the film “same old story.”

If you ever go outside of the country and you ask people from other countries what is the first word that pops in their head when you see “The United States of America” they say things like freedom, richness, where dreams come true, happiness. But is the reality? Or is it just for some? In my own humble opinion, I believe that all this only some have it while the others get it ripped from them. I mean, look at Jimmy he ran from his country because he didn’t want to serve in his military. So he decided to return to his country and “study painting int the free country.” And what they did to him and the rest of Japanese Americans? They took their citizenship and broke them not only physically and mentally. WHY? Because they didn’t look like your typical American, and that is racial profiling.
Jimmy went from describing his own country as a country of freedom to a weak and garbage America.
You could have seen how hurt and broken this man was with all his art. Every single thing Jimmy drew was an insight into his pain. And I am so happy that this country didn’t take away at least his love for his country and his painting.

As I read Fictive Fragments of a Father and Son by David Mura, there was this certain thing that kept popping in my head. I couldn’t point to it at that moment, but as I kept thinking, it finally came to my head: W.E.B Du Bois and his Double Consciousness theory. This term describes the internal conflict experienced by subordinated groups in an oppressive society. The internal dilemma is that a person’s identity is divided into several facets.  Du Bois states in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk “double consciousness” as follows: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. This concept became a way to describe the dilemma that African Americans were facing because they didn’t know how quite to be American but also African, which caused them to have an identity crisis, I would say.

After reading David Mura’s story, this concept came to my head because I feel that the same issues that African Americans were facing back then, we are still facing them today with not only them but with every single race that is not white. With people that are not white-skinned with blue eyes and blonde hair but that are still Americans. It is safe to say that now in days is not enough to be an American citizen to be able to have the same opportunities as others that do look American.  But rather, I feel that for us to be Americans, we must play the part but still work ten times harder. We must be able to sacrifice who we are as like our cultures and background, and sometimes even allowed people to change or shorten our name. To sacrifice who we are to society is too much. But that is what most immigrants must do. I believe that is what Du Bois tried to convey with the double consciousness how can we be American and remain true to ourselves without taken away who we are. This story demonstrates how damaging it could be for a person to sacrifice who they are to please society.