Sitting Ducks

Grace Chung

ESEM Paper 5
October 4, 2014

Sitting Ducks

When I was six, my mother signed me up for violin lessons, I wanted to dance and be in my elementary school’s play of Grease. My mother was quick to discourage me from trying out, both for the play and my school’s dance team; she was adamant in grooming me to be the next Midori. Being only a six-year-old girl, I did what my mother wished and tried to respect her good intentions.

But I hated violin. In my second lesson, I threw down my bow and broke it. I complained every single day while I practiced. In a decade of playing violin, I was only on Suziki Book Four: Concertos. I resisted my mother. I resisted every member of my family, when they told me I should practice more. In all, I resisted the expectation, so central to Korean culture, of being a high achieving individual who brought honor to her family. 

In “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Mary Louise Pratt she describes “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other.” She assumes that, in these areas she calls “contact zones,” individuals from each culture will be able to represent their culture to another. I disagree. While Pratt’s ideal of connecting in a contact zone is great, she fails to acknowledge that individuals within a culture are also undergoing their own struggle of either fitting into their culture or breaking out of the mold their culture enforces. It is idealistic and naïve of her to infer that every individual from each culture has already found his or her place within the culture.

Despite my challenge to Pratt, I still believe that a contact zone can still exist—not between two different cultures, but between two individuals with differing resistances to their respective cultures or differing statuses coming together.

When I encountered the African American male at the train station, I failed to practice the “art of a contact zone.” While he tried to talk to me, I was quick to judge him, automatically placing him in a stereotype that he could have, like me, been resisting. Literally walking away, I was like the inhabitants who walked away in Le Guin's short story, “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”.

The negative press and media attention that black males receive causes stories like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown to happen. No armed or unarmed black man is safe from walking down the street without receiving judgment—judgment that is often fueled by the media and racism. This judgment is used as a crutch for people to excuse their blatantly racist behavior. Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, both unarmed, were shot because in Trayvon’s case he looked “suspicious” to George Zimmerman and in Michael’s situation he did not get out of the street fast enough.

When a black man is walking on a street, some women clutch their purses tighter or avoid crossing paths with the man completely. If a black man enters any store, he subjects himself to the possibility of being followed by the security guards or owners. Videos on YouTube depicting African American men being victims of racist remarks garner millions of hits. Black the color itself is associated with death and evil opposed to white, which is often considered pure and good. The negativity that surrounds the color black and the African American population allows society to scapegoat the African American community as a whole.

When we walk away from a negative stereotype, we reinforce it. By walking away, we take away all possibility of establishing a contact zone. We, ourselves, fail to acknowledge the constant struggle of one another that involves resisting or finding our place within the very culture that is central to our identity. For most, our culture is displayed through our physical appearances—the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes, the clothes we wear. Despite the physicality of our cultures, we ignore the negative things or the stereotypes and allow them to continue. By staying quiet, we continue to walk in the darkness instead of shining a light on the issues from this world. If we cannot understand the constant struggle of resisting to be like how our culture is perceived, then we have lost our way and the contact zone never had a chance of being established. 

 

 

Bibliography

Mary Louise Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone. Profession (1991): 33-40. 

Ursula LeGuin, The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas.The Wind's Twelve Quarters. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.