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Reflection

Each of the novels we have read for class have had a main theme of intersectionality. Each person does not fit into just one category of a human, we fit into many. As a white woman, I find it crucial to understand that women of different races have a very different struggle than I do in this world. Not only do that have to be scared of how they act or what they do, they have to worry about how others will perceive them based off of their race. The novels that we have read have given insight into the lives of women, especially women of color. 

In my first blog post, I talked about the intersectionality of race and gender. I also talked about the way that Starr, a young black woman, had to display certain parts of herself at different times so that she wouldn’t get stereotyped. The duality of Starr is one of the constant themes of the novel, given that she lives in a “ghetto” neighborhood, while going to school at a “white” high school. Women of color deal with this everyday, while a white man has never had to think twice about the consequences of their behavior. 

In my second blog post, I talked about the intersectionality of race and religion. I also talked about how the current political climate in America has emboldened the racist minority to be very loud and outspoken after Trump was elected. Not only have they been loud, but the amount of hate crimes against Islamic people has been the highest it has been since the aftermath of 9/11. In Home Fire, it follows a few main characters that are Islamic, and they deal with very similar problems. Hate crimes were committed against some of the characters in the novel as well as discrimination for being Islamic and people of color. 

In my third blog post, the intersectionality of Station Eleven is more subdued than in the other books. It doesn’t talk about race, barely talks about gender, but it does talk about art and religion. Some are looked down upon by their religion, and others are not. But the stereotypical gender constructs aren’t a main point of conversation in this novel. They are more focused on survival, and they have been for 20 years, so gender roles are outdated in Station Eleven. The main theme of the novel was how we depend on art during hard times. It gives our minds a break from the struggle of survival. As Kristen has always said, “survival is insufficient”, so we have to find the beauty in the artistic world around us rather than living in a world after civilization has left.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed all three of the novels we have read in class so far. They have all made me think about the themes of gender, race and religion, far after I had finished reading them. Each novel has brought something new to the idea of intersectionality and the idea that women do not all fit into the same category. Feminism with out intersectionality is not feminism. 

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Survival is Insufficient

Ever human has primal instincts, all of which are necessary for one thing: survival. In the novel Stations Eleven by  Emily St. John Mandel, the story follows seven main characters around in their daily lives pre and post apocalypse. Even though the book follows people 20 years after the apocalypse, one of the things that remain is art. Comic books, Shakespearean plays, novels, and Beethoven all remain after the world ends. This sticks with the underlying theme that life is about more than just survival, it’s about art, happiness, relationships, and the world around you. This novel doesn’t focus on gender or race, because they are so focused on survival. But in a few instances they do bring up gender, and they do so when it comes to art. 

The apocalypse is caused by something they call the Georgian Flu, where death comes within 24 hours of contracting the virus. You never find out how many people actually die because of the virus or in the years after civilization collapsed, but some of the characters believe it to be about 99.7% of the Earth’s population. This leads to a total collapse of the world as they knew it, no electricity, running water, internet, or medicine. The book switches perspectives between characters every chapter, the main characters are: Kristen, Jeevan, Arthur, Frank, Clark, Miranda and Tyler. The most interesting thing is that all the main characters are somehow connected through Arthur, even though he died a few days before the collapse. The book also switches to and from before and 20 years after the collapse, while focusing on the daily life everyone is living in these two different times. 

Through the majority of the book, we are following the Traveling Symphony, which is the traveling band of Shakespearean actors, while they go and preform for towns around the Great Lakes. This shows us that people are still hungry for entertainment even though the world as they knew it had ended. People are still hungry for experiences, and they’re sick of just trying to survive. Mandel said in an interview with NPR that “There's something about art I think that can remind us of our humanity. It could remind us of our civilization.” 

One of the forms of art that does stand out in the book is the Dr.Eleven Comics, written by Miranda, and owned by both Kristen and Tyler. When reading the book I automatically assumed that the comic book was written by a man, which is a stupid notion that I had due to the fact comic books are mostly male oriented. The book made me question why I previously thought that as well as why I was surprised to find out it was a woman. Even in the book some characters are surprised when they find out the art the Miranda has been focused on for so long is a series of comic books. After the collapse, people aren’t so concerned with gender. They don’t care if the best actor or tuba player is a man or woman, they just want the person who is the best for the job. The only time where Kristen is concerned that she is a woman is when she is thinking about whether or not she is strong, or tough enough for this world. The fact of the matter is that the new world isn’t concerned with trivial stuff like gender, they’re concerned about surviving. 

https://www.npr.org/2015/06/20/415782006/survival-is-insufficient-station-eleven-preserves-art-after-the-apocalypse

Reminders of past civilizations have always been very interesting to humans. It’s a reminder that even thousands of years ago, people still found happiness and creativity in the world around them. In Station Eleven, it is very important to most of the main characters to stay in contact with the world they came from, even if they don’t really remember it. The Museum of Civilization is created by Clark, in order to help people remember the world as he knew it. He searched through bags at the airport to get memories of their previous life in order to make a museum that everyone could visit. He had things like high heels, laptops, iPhones, and Starbucks cups. Maybe he collected these things to remind people of a better world, or maybe he just kept them because he felt nostalgic about them. Either way, the museum helped many people remember the humanity that they once had. 

One of the main things that I took away from this book is that survival is in fact insufficient. The thing that make people humane is art. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman, as long as you are alive, you can live. Art takes people away from their daily struggle of living just for a moment and they can feel happy once again. 

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Hate Crimes

After the election of 2016 when Donald Trump got elected president, the number of hate crimes began to rise. Trump has openly stated that after 9/11 in New York City, that he had seen Islamic people openly celebrate in the streets, which has been widely debunked by tons of people. Trump still continues to say this. He has also called for a total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, as well as retweet anti-Muslim propaganda from a far-right British nationalist. Since Donald Trump was elected president, the number of hate crimes against Muslims have been the highest since the aftermath of 9/11. 

The hate rhetoric that spews from our presidents mouth emboldens the racists and the bigots. They think that if the leader of our country believes these things then it is okay for them to believe it. In March 2015,  Trump states that he believes "Islam hates us," that Muslims have "unbelievable hatred," and that it is "very hard" to separate "radical Islam" from the religion as a whole.

Since he was elected, the largest Mosque in California has been vandalized three times, covered with anti-Islamic rhetoric. One of the most extreme hate crimes that had happened less than a year after Trump was elected was a Quran  filled with bacon, set on fire, and had the pages ripped out and thrown all over the sidewalk of the Mosque. This hate crime happened at the height of Ramadan, which is the most sacred time of the year for Muslims. The level of disrespect that has happened to this Mosque during the time of Ramadan is meant to be seen as an attack on the Muslim religion and the people that practice it. In the article linked below the legal director at New York's chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said that, “this is as clear as a swastika or a burning cross”, these crimes are meant to be seen as a symbol of hate, saying these people do not belong here. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-muslim-hate-crimes-sacramento-police-investigate/

These hate crimes against the California Mosque are not the only hate crimes that have happened during Trumps presidency. One that specifically stuck out to me was a video of a Muslim woman wearing a hijab sitting in her car, was confronted by a middle aged white woman. The white woman screams that the Muslim woman “needs to go back to her country”,even though the Muslim woman is American. After the Muslim woman states that she is American, the white woman say that “We are going to kill all of you, we are going to kill every one of you f***ing Muslims”. The video attached shows the incident. This is a vile woman who is a racist, she states that the police wouldn’t care if they tried to kill a Muslim woman. 

The amount of hate crimes that have happened since Donald Trump was elected president is insane. Hate is an epidemic in our country and it needs to be eradicated. There is no place for hate here. Below I will link a map that shows every hate crime that has happened since he was elected. The map shows hate crimes and people of color that have either been harassed by Trump, or by one of his followers. 

https://americasvoice.org/trumphatemap/ 

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The Duality Of Women

Every living being has many parts to their personality, but people have learned not to show off every side of themselves at once to protect themselves. With women, I feel like it is really hard to be able to show off many areas of yourself with out people calling them things like crazy, bossy, slutty, b*tchy, or emotional. Women have been shielding ourselves from society solely because others will see us as weak or even too fierce. Most women are seen negatively when people use descriptive words that are associated with leadership and power, while men are seen very positively when the same words are used. Linked below is a study done that shows the percentage of people who think negatively towards women when they are described a certain way. The way that women delude ourselves just so people can see us positively is ridiculous. I’m ashamed to say that I often delude myself so others will see me positively, and I’m sick of it. Women should not me afraid to be themselves.  

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/strong-men-caring-women/

One of the main internal struggles that Starr has in The Hate U Give was how and when to show the two different sides of herself. There was the Garden Heights side, which is where she’s from, and the Williamson side, which is the prep school she goes to. From an outsiders view, Garden Heights isn’t the best place to live. There’s gang violence and drugs, and during the book there are multiple occasions where shootings happen on Starr’s street. On the other side, Williamson Prep is the school that Starr and her brothers go to outside of the city. People from Garden Heights see Williamson as a place for rich white people to go, and people from Williamson see Garden Heights as the ghetto. 

When looking at the different sets of friends she has, she’s always scared to show them both sides of herself. When talking to Maya and Hailey, or even her boyfriend Chris from Williamson, she never feels as though she can tell them what is really happening in her life. She is embarrassed to show them her house, family, and even her friends from Garden Heights. She doesn’t want them to see the side of her that could be perceived as ghetto. Starr is always holding herself back to her Williamson friends so they don’t see her as the “angry black woman” stereotype. When she’s around her friend Kenya, or anyone else her age from Garden Heights, she doesn’t feel like she belongs. She doesn’t feel like she is cool enough, she can’t dance like they do, and she doesn’t really like the same stuff that they do even though there are similarities. Starr does feel less like an outsider when she’s with Kenya, since they are kind of related because they share a brother. But Starr doesn’t fit into either of these narratives. After witnessing the murder of her friend Khalil by a police officer, she finds it very hard to filter herself in both worlds and starts showing people who she really is. 

After Khalil was shot, at Williamson Starr initially had a lot of problems trying to act normal at school and around her friends. Everyone at Williamson assumed that Khalil was a drug-dealing gang-banger, even though he wasn’t. Starr feared that if she was associated with him at school then she would be seen as the girl from the ghetto who was friends with a drug dealer. While trying to hide the trauma that she witnessed, Starr ended up pushing her friends and boyfriend farther away. This made it harder for her to process her emotions without the support she needed, which in turn made her true self come out. She started calling people out on their bullsh*t, especially Hailey, and she was unapologetically herself around Chris and Maya. After Starr started being herself around all of her friends, she grew closer with all of them, while filtering out the bad friends, making her wonder why she hid her true self from all of them in the first place. 

The duality of Starr is one of the constant themes of the novel. Her internal struggle focuses on growing up in a very proud black family, while trying to fit in at a school where you could count the people of color on your hands. At Williamson, she struggled with hiding her “blackness” in fear that the other students would call her angry and ghetto. While in Garden Heights she feared that she wasn’t black enough to fit in with many people her age. Women of color deal with this every single day, while white men have never had to censor who they are in order to seem professional or likable. This double standard that all women deal with, especially women of color, is past due to end. How can we call ourselves a modern society when over 50% of the population doesn’t feel like they are able to be themselves in everyday life?