Education

I'm honestly really not sure what to write about here. Media feels like such a big, abstract concept and at the same time one that I think about a lot. More than anything else, I think about theater. I spend about 15 hours a week in rehearsal, another hour in production meeting, and a majority of my "free time" thinking about theater in various ways. I think about theory and reality, I read plays, and I write plays. And because I consider art to be inherently political, I think about what I write and what impact it has. I think about "theater of the opressed" and "revolutionary theater" and any number of other things because I want my art to be more than beautiful - I want it to be meaningful. 

Thinking on what I wanted to write about for this race journal entry, my first thought was that I would know exactly what to write about if this were a course on gender or on sexuality. I could write thousands of pages on representations (specifically, the lack thereof) of non-binary and trans people in media, and I think about it pretty much every time I watch a movie, catch a TV show, or pay attention to pop culture. At first, I brushed this thought aside, because I knew I needed to focus on race. Then, I realized that this thought has everything to do with race. It speaks to the huge privilege I live with to not know what to write about, to be able to "move on" to other identities in my head of which I am painfully cognizant when engaging with mainstream media.

This morning, these two articles appeared in the online educations news:

http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20160912_Public_school_pays_off_for_Philly_family.html

http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20160913_Before_court_weighs_in__a_rally_for_education_funding.html

Race and the media…wow. There’s a lot of material there. There’s so much that I can say about the media and utter crap that Hollywood churns out. When I think of race and the media, I think of a text I recently sent to one of my Asian friends, asking “Do you ever wonder which white actress would play you in a movie about your life[?]” I was joking, but I know and other Asian-American people know that Hollywood has a hard time casting Asians for Asian roles. I'm just thinking of Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, Matt Damon, the entire Avatar: the Last Airbender movie—although let’s be honest don’t you think it’s interesting that the only brown actor in that movie was cast to play the bad guy?

I am not yet inspired to write a post about race in media, but I will give it a go (Meaning, this is not something I think of a lot so I don't have any rants to write out, or anything in my head that feels particularily insightful. I know that doesn't matter). There are just so many things I could talk about! What it's like to see black girls on Instgram. How I count black people in my favorite TV shows, and cringe when they're the bad guy, or sigh when they die. Jane the Virgin is an amazing show with a beautifully diverse cast, and I still yearn to have a developped black character. But I'm happy for my latina friends who get to see themselves on screen.

My friend Portabella, who’s white, and I walked into Wawa at 1:30 am on Saturday night/ Sunday morning and we began perusing the store. We were standing in line to pay for our food and these two black men in suits walked into the store. One of them, who I will call John, looked at Portabella and said, “Nice dreads.”

“Thanks,” Portabella responded.

“Do you make art?” John asked. Then John and his friend, who I will call Sebastian, and Portabella and I started talking about art. Sebastian said that he was into photography. Portabella talked about how she’s still in school and that she’s a painter. Portabella said she was an art major.

John told us he and Sebastian worked in a country club. They said they just got off work.