Voice

I've been thinking a lot about our class discussion about the Supreme Court case that would effectively end affirmative action.

In this clip, from Real Time with Bill Maher, actress Kerry Washington debates (informally, but swiftly) commentator Will Cain on the issue, fighting his suggestion that we live in a post-racial society. I feel like this encompasses a lot of what my feelings are on the issue, and brings up a lot of great points, so please watch if you're interested!

Growing up, I learned a lot about the injustices in this world through music, especially through rap. So I will use this form of media to represent schools and prisons. I am posting two things from activist, poet and late artist, Tupac Amaru Shakur. One is a video of his song "trapped" which is filmed in a prison and talks about the ways in which black men--hard to find content on female incarceration--are targeted and, ultimately, trapped in and beyond prison. I have also included the lyrics. The second thing I wanted to share was an interview (in transcript form although the entire video is on Youtube) from Tupac at age 17 speaking in great detail about the injustices in education and the irrelevance of some its subjects. I love this interview because it is from the perspective of a subject we have only analyzed and have not really heard from: a young person of color from an inner-city background. I'd like to share my favorite excerpt. It is Tupac talking about what should be taught in schools:

I have very distinct memories of this chain email going around showing images of a new prison in Austria, which were falsely attributed to a Chicago prison.  There was complete outrage that tax dollars could pay for a prison so luxurious, and I immediately thought of the email when Jody asked to show our images of prisons.

http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_ritz_a_teacher_growing_green_in_the_south_bronx.html

(image and link to video under "Read More")

The Canadian police procedural TV show "Rookie Blue" is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. Its tagline is that it's like "Grey's Anatomy" with rookie cops, and it shows the day to day lives, cases, and yes, romantic travails of 5 rookies and their superiors. This past summer, the show (in its 3rd season) had a storyline where one of the rookies, Epstein, shoots a young black man, Tyler Marks, in a convenience store because he believes that there is a robbery in progress. Tyler is wearing a hoodie and "looks suspicious" in some way to Epstein, and Epstein thinks Tyler has a gun, so he pulls out his gun and shoots, wounding Tyler fatally. In the investigation following Tyler's death, the Internal Affairs department questions Epstein's belief that Tyler was holding a weapon of any kind. This episode reminded me a lot of the Trayvon Martin case, in which a young black man was shot essentially for wearing a hoodie and being black. I had hoped that the show would address the underlying racism of Epstein's actions, and find him guilty of murdering Tyler without cause. But, instead, to make the show lighter and keep Epstein's name clean, it is decided that he was not wrong to shoot Tyler, because there was another young black man in the store who was actually robbing it, and so Epstein had "valid" concerns for his own safety. 

Like Owl, I went to a huge high school, so I'm including a video that was made of my school a few years before I went. I think it gives a fairly good sense of the scale of the school, but it's also interesting because of the similarities and differences to prison. The security guard checking people in, for example, is more similar to prisons – and in fact, after this video was made, scanners were installed at the entrance to the school so that students had to scan in or out of the building to track attendance. Unlike prisons, though, movement of students in the hallways and common spaces was fairly unrestricted. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mun_xeznxT0

Next I wanted to share a fairly well known media representation of prison – the women's prison in the musical Chicago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqV7HOVOPLE

And finally, I found two images – one of a school building and one of a prison building. Which one do you think looks more forboding?