I believe it is natural to determine people’s race and gender linguistically, but the wrong comes in when a person has pre-conceived notions about an individual’s nature based on their speech. Still, I don’t like the label linguistic profiling because it comes across that determining who a person is by the way they sound is wrong, and to me, it’s not. It is natural and common to recognize voices and it helps us learn more about each other. I use to have a huge problem with the “you talk white” or “you talk black” ordeal, but I realized that it is just an identifier. Like everything, there are different cases so proper-speaking people aren’t always white, but usually white (according to what you deem is or is not proper).
Like Rice in Linguistic Profiling and in the movie, I can usually tell whether my mother is talking to a white or black person on the phone, but I am not always right. I also do not assume because my mom is talking to a white person that the conversation will be different from if she was talking to a black person - I just recognize that the person is of or is not of a certain race. So my question is, what is linguistic profiling called if someone isn’t really profiling? Is it still linguistic profiling? If so, is the problem really linguistic profiling or stereotyping in general, and how wrong is stereotyping? If we don’t think negative of the people we’re stereotyping, isn’t stereotyping just putting people into categories? The Sociological definition of stereotyping according to Dictionary.com is “a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group: The cowboy and Indian are American stereotypes.” So therefore, don’t all of us fall into some category, whether or not we satisfy all the requirements for that specific group? The readings therefore confuse me for they somewhat but not always blame something that is done naturally and healthily. We stereotype be nature, not nurture and the unsupported and unreasonable thought of prejudice is a whole different thing. In the end, prejudice is just whether we get equal opportunity or not. Yes, it is wrong to withhold opportunities from people because you are prejudice, but I personally don’t want anything from you if you are going to judge me at all, whether it be by the way I talk, walk, look, or act. It is not wrong to make assumptions, it is just wrong to act out of hatred on those assumptions. And moralistically, hatred is wrong in itself.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
Response Blog FEBRUARY 1st
Right now my major is undecided, but since I have an elementary education minor, my major has to be declared in the college of Arts and Sciences. I am very interested in Sociology, but I also like Communications. Unfortunately, Communications is not in the College of Arts and Sciences. When I read “Sexism in English: A 1990s Update,” I was extremely excited because it opened my mind to the idea of linguist Sociology, or better, linguistic evidence of sociological observations. That, to me, is a slight mixture of the two subjects I am interested in, so it therefore brought me hope. I like to consider myself pretty observant, maybe about unimportant things, but I do find studying people interesting. The way we Communicate interests me, but I never realized the connotations my language in particular often suggests. I do normally put a masculine form of a word before an feminine, but I have never seen a problem with that. King and Queen, boys and girls just comes naturally to me.
In class, when we discussed “Put Down That Paper and Talk to Me!”, we got on the subject of equality, particularly the equality between today’s men and women. In the last paragraph, Tannen says that “Being admitted to a dance does not ensure the participation of someone who has learned to dance to a different rhythm”. I totally agree. We fight for equality, but we don’t often realize that there are differences, so a man’s equality and a woman’s equality often encompass different things. An example that is slightly off, but still proves my point is an episode I remember of Good Times. The black kids were allowed to take the same standardized tests in the same setting as the white kids, and though the black kids were no more or less smart, their test scores were low. This was due to a language barrier. The children could do math, but the question went something to the effect of ….If there were 4 kids and 3 went into the dining room and 1 stayed in the living room, how many kids were in the living room? The math was simple, but no black kid at that time in that community lived in a house and none had heard of a living room or a dinning room. They were not stupid, but they simply had not been introduced to that type of living. It was not an equal opportunity test. That also reminds me of the movie that we have to have watched by Monday. The black kids thrown into a sea of white kids for equality were not equal in learning. The same goes for men and women. Just because a man can do something doesn’t mean a woman should. This is true for lifting extremely heavy objects; there are women who are body builders who can do it, but our bodies are made differently than men. When the women mentioned in Nilsen’s article cut off their breasts to shoot their arrows better, it proved that having breasts made archery slightly more difficult for women. Certain things should be considered when determining equality.
In class, when we discussed “Put Down That Paper and Talk to Me!”, we got on the subject of equality, particularly the equality between today’s men and women. In the last paragraph, Tannen says that “Being admitted to a dance does not ensure the participation of someone who has learned to dance to a different rhythm”. I totally agree. We fight for equality, but we don’t often realize that there are differences, so a man’s equality and a woman’s equality often encompass different things. An example that is slightly off, but still proves my point is an episode I remember of Good Times. The black kids were allowed to take the same standardized tests in the same setting as the white kids, and though the black kids were no more or less smart, their test scores were low. This was due to a language barrier. The children could do math, but the question went something to the effect of ….If there were 4 kids and 3 went into the dining room and 1 stayed in the living room, how many kids were in the living room? The math was simple, but no black kid at that time in that community lived in a house and none had heard of a living room or a dinning room. They were not stupid, but they simply had not been introduced to that type of living. It was not an equal opportunity test. That also reminds me of the movie that we have to have watched by Monday. The black kids thrown into a sea of white kids for equality were not equal in learning. The same goes for men and women. Just because a man can do something doesn’t mean a woman should. This is true for lifting extremely heavy objects; there are women who are body builders who can do it, but our bodies are made differently than men. When the women mentioned in Nilsen’s article cut off their breasts to shoot their arrows better, it proved that having breasts made archery slightly more difficult for women. Certain things should be considered when determining equality.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Reflective Essay (January 25)
I was walking through the hallways after lunch on a Wednesday, struggling to find the sponsor teacher for the chess club that I had just been informed existed at my school. The fact that I was lost is crazy now that I recall this story because I’d been at the high school 3 years and still couldn’t remember which classrooms were in basement one versus basement two! On the other hand, however, I guess it was understandable because I had just found out that my high school had chess club; I really wasn‘t an observant person. Still, my off course walk was good because I meet Emara, and the stories of him kept me laughing…and at times a little afraid, for weeks.
That Wednesday I was originally by myself, but through my search for the chess club sponsor, I realized there were some boys following me. The boys were mostly horse playing behind me and talking loudly, but I knew they were following me because I’d made a circle twice. When I decided to finally stop and turn around, they spoke to me. I didn’t know them but I smiled and waved. One was black, and three were white (I thought). Whether or not they said hi I’ll never know, but they did give me some sort of greeting. The black guy then said “I Amada, what’s your na?” Of course I said “Huh?” for I had never heard of a guy named Amada and I didn’t have a “na”. He said “Huh” right back. We looked at each other for a second and I realized, he didn’t speak English.
It was surprising to me because he looked like a normal black kid and most of his friends I had guessed were white, but they were all African too. I kept asking him his name but I honestly couldn’t pronounce it. Finally I just asked him to spell it. “E-M-A-R-A”, you had to roll the “r”. I cannot to this day roll my “r”s, so I’ll probably never be able to pronounce his name right, but I can definitely spell it. I told him my name and he took my hand and kissed it. It was rather sweet, but still pretty odd because black kids at my school did not usually kiss girl hands upon meeting each other. I’m pretty sure I blushed and I know I told him it was nice to meet him. I believe he said something to the effect of “nice to meet you too” but his accent was extremely heavy. It was evident to me then that he did speak English, but I just couldn’t understand it. After that day I started running into him more often because I soon learned that the ESL classroom was pretty close to my locker.
We would attempt to talk some days when I saw him during school, but I never could understand him completely. In our few chats, I learned no more than that he was a sophomore (which was a grade under me) and that he not only spoke a native African language, but he spoke fluent French and English (though his accent was extremely heavy). We never really could get past that. Now that I look back at it, I realize that we would have been able to communicate better if we had wrote each other rather than tried to communicate orally. Still I figured he understood most of what I said especially when I didn’t use slang. I later discovered that we often were not on the same page when communicating, and we soon stopped chatting.
After we really stopped talking, some days he would wait for me after my psychology class. It was fine at first because I knew the class was near my locker and I assumed he just saw me coming out of that room often so he knew what time I in was there. But then he started waiting on me after other classes and I felt slightly uncomfortable cause he wouldn‘t say anything. He would just walk a little ways with me, stop, and go the other way. It was most uncomfortable because he would walk past the doorway during my classes more than once in a class setting and I found it odd that he knew where they were and odd that he was just watching me and wasn’t in a class himself. When I would look at him he’d dart out of the doorways. I thought it was funny at first, but soon it was bothersome to me because he would be everywhere. I’ve already admitted that I wasn’t too observant of a student, but I knew he wasn’t normally walking the same path as me during the day. He was often going out of his way to see me and it could have been sweet, but he would never really say anything…he was just always there. We weren’t communicating well enough to be hanging out everyday and we just occasionally spoke to each other. Sometimes he would be standing outside of the girls bathroom when I came out too, so that is when I decided to confront him. My friends were noticing him watching me in the hallways and outside of classrooms and soon so did my psychology teacher.
Before I got a chance to speak to him about it, he came up to my locker one day, hugged me, and told me what I made out to be “I’ve never had a girlfriend before.” I said, “ok?” and he hugged me again and stood there. He thought I was his girlfriend. I attributed that to why he had been basically stalking me during the classes he was not in with me. So I tried to talk to him about it and set him straight. I told him he was very nice and we were friends. I told him I was “not” his girlfriend as clearly as possible, and he smiled, nodded, and walked away. I remember my friend Ashley being beside me at that time and we both agreed that my explanation went well. We were totally wrong! For the next week Emara snuck up behind me everyday and hugged me and he followed me most of the time, and every day I politely told him not to do that. He always smiled and ran away. Emara either thought I was joking or confirming our relationship. I told my parents and they only made jokes like my friends, and those jokes would have been funny had I not been afraid. I started avoiding my locker after I knew his ESL class was out and I managed to not have close contact with Emara for a few days but he began catching me after school. My friends would warn me if they had seen him recently and I would walk through school on edge trying to avoid him. He would just stand there at my locker at the end of the day or before school until I started carrying all my books with me in order to avoid my locker. It was the oddest thing because even though my school was huge, he would always find me. My friend Ashley started walking with me when I did need to go to my locker because she knew I was afraid and she understood that either Emara was crazy or we had an apparent language barrier. I kept telling him to stop and he kept popping up more, these times when I was usually walking alone. When I talked to my psychology teacher she told me that the situation was more serious than I thought and that I needed to either explain to him myself that following me and hugging me and standing outside of my classrooms was not ok or I needed to get someone else to explain to him. I did not want to make it a big deal so I chose not to involve the ESL teacher or anyone else.
Finally one day when he reached out to hug me I yelled at him. I told him I did not like him and that he was scaring me. It was after school at my locker and this time there were other people around. He looked extremely hurt and confused and just walked away. I expected him to just pop up at my locker the next day but he didn’t. He never did. I saw him only occasionally the rest of my junior year and we didn’t even speak.
To this day I wish I hadn’t yelled. Although he was stalking me, he probably didn’t see it that way and I believe he was really a kind person. I realize that it must have hurt his feelings or at least confused him when I got loud because after I told him “no” a million times, he never got it until I yelled. Just like smiles are understood in every language, I think now that even if anger isn’t, yelling is probably understood everywhere… at least to some extent. We spoke once or twice my senior year and he never really smiled at me again. I tried to talk to him once since then and apologize and he asked me why I didn’t like him. The truth was I did but he didn’t understand personal space. Of course I couldn’t explain that to him, but the sad part is that I never tried to. As I look back now, I realize that I had a great opportunity to meet someone totally different from me and because of my poor effort and fear, I blew the chance to help an ESL student and the chance to learn about a different culture. I hope to never hurt a person again because of miscommunication.
That Wednesday I was originally by myself, but through my search for the chess club sponsor, I realized there were some boys following me. The boys were mostly horse playing behind me and talking loudly, but I knew they were following me because I’d made a circle twice. When I decided to finally stop and turn around, they spoke to me. I didn’t know them but I smiled and waved. One was black, and three were white (I thought). Whether or not they said hi I’ll never know, but they did give me some sort of greeting. The black guy then said “I Amada, what’s your na?” Of course I said “Huh?” for I had never heard of a guy named Amada and I didn’t have a “na”. He said “Huh” right back. We looked at each other for a second and I realized, he didn’t speak English.
It was surprising to me because he looked like a normal black kid and most of his friends I had guessed were white, but they were all African too. I kept asking him his name but I honestly couldn’t pronounce it. Finally I just asked him to spell it. “E-M-A-R-A”, you had to roll the “r”. I cannot to this day roll my “r”s, so I’ll probably never be able to pronounce his name right, but I can definitely spell it. I told him my name and he took my hand and kissed it. It was rather sweet, but still pretty odd because black kids at my school did not usually kiss girl hands upon meeting each other. I’m pretty sure I blushed and I know I told him it was nice to meet him. I believe he said something to the effect of “nice to meet you too” but his accent was extremely heavy. It was evident to me then that he did speak English, but I just couldn’t understand it. After that day I started running into him more often because I soon learned that the ESL classroom was pretty close to my locker.
We would attempt to talk some days when I saw him during school, but I never could understand him completely. In our few chats, I learned no more than that he was a sophomore (which was a grade under me) and that he not only spoke a native African language, but he spoke fluent French and English (though his accent was extremely heavy). We never really could get past that. Now that I look back at it, I realize that we would have been able to communicate better if we had wrote each other rather than tried to communicate orally. Still I figured he understood most of what I said especially when I didn’t use slang. I later discovered that we often were not on the same page when communicating, and we soon stopped chatting.
After we really stopped talking, some days he would wait for me after my psychology class. It was fine at first because I knew the class was near my locker and I assumed he just saw me coming out of that room often so he knew what time I in was there. But then he started waiting on me after other classes and I felt slightly uncomfortable cause he wouldn‘t say anything. He would just walk a little ways with me, stop, and go the other way. It was most uncomfortable because he would walk past the doorway during my classes more than once in a class setting and I found it odd that he knew where they were and odd that he was just watching me and wasn’t in a class himself. When I would look at him he’d dart out of the doorways. I thought it was funny at first, but soon it was bothersome to me because he would be everywhere. I’ve already admitted that I wasn’t too observant of a student, but I knew he wasn’t normally walking the same path as me during the day. He was often going out of his way to see me and it could have been sweet, but he would never really say anything…he was just always there. We weren’t communicating well enough to be hanging out everyday and we just occasionally spoke to each other. Sometimes he would be standing outside of the girls bathroom when I came out too, so that is when I decided to confront him. My friends were noticing him watching me in the hallways and outside of classrooms and soon so did my psychology teacher.
Before I got a chance to speak to him about it, he came up to my locker one day, hugged me, and told me what I made out to be “I’ve never had a girlfriend before.” I said, “ok?” and he hugged me again and stood there. He thought I was his girlfriend. I attributed that to why he had been basically stalking me during the classes he was not in with me. So I tried to talk to him about it and set him straight. I told him he was very nice and we were friends. I told him I was “not” his girlfriend as clearly as possible, and he smiled, nodded, and walked away. I remember my friend Ashley being beside me at that time and we both agreed that my explanation went well. We were totally wrong! For the next week Emara snuck up behind me everyday and hugged me and he followed me most of the time, and every day I politely told him not to do that. He always smiled and ran away. Emara either thought I was joking or confirming our relationship. I told my parents and they only made jokes like my friends, and those jokes would have been funny had I not been afraid. I started avoiding my locker after I knew his ESL class was out and I managed to not have close contact with Emara for a few days but he began catching me after school. My friends would warn me if they had seen him recently and I would walk through school on edge trying to avoid him. He would just stand there at my locker at the end of the day or before school until I started carrying all my books with me in order to avoid my locker. It was the oddest thing because even though my school was huge, he would always find me. My friend Ashley started walking with me when I did need to go to my locker because she knew I was afraid and she understood that either Emara was crazy or we had an apparent language barrier. I kept telling him to stop and he kept popping up more, these times when I was usually walking alone. When I talked to my psychology teacher she told me that the situation was more serious than I thought and that I needed to either explain to him myself that following me and hugging me and standing outside of my classrooms was not ok or I needed to get someone else to explain to him. I did not want to make it a big deal so I chose not to involve the ESL teacher or anyone else.
Finally one day when he reached out to hug me I yelled at him. I told him I did not like him and that he was scaring me. It was after school at my locker and this time there were other people around. He looked extremely hurt and confused and just walked away. I expected him to just pop up at my locker the next day but he didn’t. He never did. I saw him only occasionally the rest of my junior year and we didn’t even speak.
To this day I wish I hadn’t yelled. Although he was stalking me, he probably didn’t see it that way and I believe he was really a kind person. I realize that it must have hurt his feelings or at least confused him when I got loud because after I told him “no” a million times, he never got it until I yelled. Just like smiles are understood in every language, I think now that even if anger isn’t, yelling is probably understood everywhere… at least to some extent. We spoke once or twice my senior year and he never really smiled at me again. I tried to talk to him once since then and apologize and he asked me why I didn’t like him. The truth was I did but he didn’t understand personal space. Of course I couldn’t explain that to him, but the sad part is that I never tried to. As I look back now, I realize that I had a great opportunity to meet someone totally different from me and because of my poor effort and fear, I blew the chance to help an ESL student and the chance to learn about a different culture. I hope to never hurt a person again because of miscommunication.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Response Blog January 18th
I never really paid much attention to the different aspects and interpretations that could come from one specific language - especially my native language, English, until now. Not only is this language class affecting my outlook of English, but the communications class I am taking this year is coinciding with this new viewpoint. Spoken English and written English is very different, many rules of the language apply to some situations and not to others, and we often mean the opposite of what is said in either correct vocabulary or slang. For example, in “Language Conveys News” I remember the author mentioning that we park in driveways and drive in parkways, and also that blueberries are blue but cranberries are not cran. How do I explain this to a person who is not fluent in English if I cannot give a reason to these bizarre rules myself? I have never considered those words to be odd until now, and since that has been brought to my attention I can think of many words with the same strange meanings. It is important to not take words I use for granted but to think about what they mean…at least if I am ever attempting to converse with a foreigner. When I read the essay about ESL students, I realized that I should probably work harder to communicate more effectively and properly because everyone does not understand what I am saying. This was even more evident in “Me Talk Pretty One day” because I realized that as much as the students struggled with French, there are many, probably in in my own dorm room, who struggle as much in English. It is unfair to assume what is being said is understandable to everyone, especially if I know I have said it incorrectly. I should not assume what I have said is automatically comprehended. The same is true even when I am speaking to someone who is also native to my own language.
It is natural for me to put stress on certain words when speaking and it is natural for me to apply certain stress on words when reading to understand sentences in certain contexts. ESL students, however have to experience that, rather that be taught it. When I read “Learning English Good” it was coincidentally after Communication class. In Communication class, my teacher had 7 students read the same sentence “I didn’t say he stole my book” with a different stress on each individual word. The exercise taught us that that one sentence had 7 equally correct, but different meanings. It was funny to me when we did the exercise because I don’t usually read a sentence and say, “hmm, this could have several meanings”, but now I am learning that to communicate effectively, I must realize this is possible. This new way of thought was confirmed when I read “So English is Taken Over the Globe. So What.” where I realized that although I may say one thing, others, especially ESL or business partners knowing little English will almost always interpret what I say incorrectly unless I am more specific. Of course this seems common knowledge - two people of different cultural and language backgrounds may often misinterpret each other- but still this can be minimized by viewing the situation from their perspective. From “Learning English Good”, I learned that in some countries, putting the subject before the verb, especially when the subject is “I”, can seem rude. It is also interesting that when communicating with foreigners, Noam Cohen say, our word “kitchen” is a nice tool but “room for which you cook in” serves the same purpose and may be better understood when communicating with people other than ourselves. It is a matter of precision and not concision that we should adapt to better understand language. I have learned that that is something that I must work to re-teach myself. I have always been taught to say what I mean in as little explanation as possible (for that can be redundant) but as a look at the language I so often incorrectly use, I must be more precise in some situations and more concise in others, I assume it is all according to whom I am addressing at the time. Hopefully this class in conjunction with my communication class will teach me how to be more aware of what I am saying, how I am saying it, and what I mean. For even in “Empty Eggs” I learned that although one thing is said, it may mean something totally opposite from what I have assumed and words can easily be accidentally or purposefully deceptive.
It is natural for me to put stress on certain words when speaking and it is natural for me to apply certain stress on words when reading to understand sentences in certain contexts. ESL students, however have to experience that, rather that be taught it. When I read “Learning English Good” it was coincidentally after Communication class. In Communication class, my teacher had 7 students read the same sentence “I didn’t say he stole my book” with a different stress on each individual word. The exercise taught us that that one sentence had 7 equally correct, but different meanings. It was funny to me when we did the exercise because I don’t usually read a sentence and say, “hmm, this could have several meanings”, but now I am learning that to communicate effectively, I must realize this is possible. This new way of thought was confirmed when I read “So English is Taken Over the Globe. So What.” where I realized that although I may say one thing, others, especially ESL or business partners knowing little English will almost always interpret what I say incorrectly unless I am more specific. Of course this seems common knowledge - two people of different cultural and language backgrounds may often misinterpret each other- but still this can be minimized by viewing the situation from their perspective. From “Learning English Good”, I learned that in some countries, putting the subject before the verb, especially when the subject is “I”, can seem rude. It is also interesting that when communicating with foreigners, Noam Cohen say, our word “kitchen” is a nice tool but “room for which you cook in” serves the same purpose and may be better understood when communicating with people other than ourselves. It is a matter of precision and not concision that we should adapt to better understand language. I have learned that that is something that I must work to re-teach myself. I have always been taught to say what I mean in as little explanation as possible (for that can be redundant) but as a look at the language I so often incorrectly use, I must be more precise in some situations and more concise in others, I assume it is all according to whom I am addressing at the time. Hopefully this class in conjunction with my communication class will teach me how to be more aware of what I am saying, how I am saying it, and what I mean. For even in “Empty Eggs” I learned that although one thing is said, it may mean something totally opposite from what I have assumed and words can easily be accidentally or purposefully deceptive.
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