Assignment for Today!

Lately what I feel we've been talking about in class and throughout all our reading is the ideas of stereotypes in America and the feeling of not wanting to be who you are for something you cant help. In American Born Chinese you have three stories, two of which there is a monkey and a boy both who don't like who they are. The monkey doesn't want to be a monkey anymore so he wears shoes, and the boy doesn't want to be Chinese anymore so he becomes an all American boy, but they're all brought together in some sort of twisted fate that links the boy and the monkey together through a stereotype of Chinese people. The boy sees the horrible things people interpret when they think of the stereotypes of the Chinese and the boy realizes that it isn't so bad anymore to be Chinese and that it can hurt people when you disown them for their race.
This all ties closely into other readings we've encountered, the poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson allows you to see that not wanting to be yourself and is inevitable going to destroy you that there is no point in being something you are not because it won't make you happy in the end. Why don't people want to be who they are... because someone has hurt their feelings made fun of their skin color, their weight or their looks. In general no one likes to be made fun of and many stereotypes and plain ignorance ties all of these together. In the dove commercial we see a betrayal of the fashion industry to distort the image of a woman to make her
"more" beautiful, and people look at her with envy that she is a beautiful woman but in real life she isn't a woman at all shes created. This all leads back to the concepts that bell hooks brought forth about the media effect the youth of America, that young people today are controlled by the idea of pop culture. That the media and the industry executives are manipulating the system and filling minds with racism and stereotypes. What kind of world are we living in, that an industry wants us to fall into the stereotypes because it makes more money. But in the end the only ones getting hurt are all of the young people absorbing this nonsense.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTzY-o-Y4y8