Richard Rodriguez "Aria"

After reading “Aria” by Richard Rodriguez, I really had to think. I had no idea that when people learn English and leave their other language, that a person could feel this way. I’ve never spoke any language other than English, and everyone in my family always spoke English at home and everywhere we went so I have never had to experience a loss of who I was. Someone’s identity covers a lot, and one part is their language that they speak. Their first language is what they identify with first. It comforted them; it helped them feel at home. That’s how Richard was when he had to learn English. He felt he was losing a part of his and his family’s identity.  The way Richard said that, “I considered Spanish to be a private language”.  You could see that he connected with it and nobody ever knew what he was saying to he felt safe in a way, to say what he wanted and only his sister and brother and his parents would understand.

                Back when Richard was in school, the schools would just ignore the kids and have them figure it out on their own. They wanted them to just get what’s going on and what’s expected of them and nobody ever cared about the emotional stuff that goes on in the process of that. Richard didn’t know what to do, or how to feel confident in himself so that’s why he went quiet for about a year.  I found a YouTube video that talks about bilingual education in the schools and what’s going on, and why it was started and when it was started.

Kozol and McIntosh

When I was reading the Kozol piece I could relate more to the man that was observing the family. He couldn’t really relate but he observed and watched and saw how difficult life was for the people that loved there. I’ve never seen poverty that bad before and I think that’s awful that it is that bad in some places. It’s unfortunate that to see kids have to grow up so fast and have to see the horrible things that are out in this world. The boy in the article was able to understand his father or it was his mother when they were talking about how there is no way for anyone to get out of this trap. They can’t grow and branch off into something new and great, the boy was able to understand that he is stuck just like his parents and probably doesn’t have an easy life ahead of him.

The Kozol piece relates to the McIntosh piece because it talk about white privilege, and how just being “white” can make someone’s life so much easier.  The man that was observing the family in the Kozol piece realized that he had so much more privileges and it was mostly due to that he was white.  In the Mcintosh piece it says that, “whites were carefully taught not to recognize that they have white power”. I agree with this statement, when McIntosh wrote down the list of things that show that there is white privilege in the world and we don’t always recognize it as white privilege. That proved to me that we have been secretly taught not to recognize white privilege that go on in this world.

In the Muwakkil article it says that, “Many Americans still believe that race still no longer affects personal prospects of success or failure”.  Obviously race does still affect success or failure, just read the Kozol piece.  Their might still be people or companies out there that don’t agree and say they hire people based on their education and experience in the field, but there are still the ones who feel “safer” I guess with only white people working for them.  Personally I believe that people should not be based on the color of their skin and should be based on if they are qualified for the job they are applying for, but I’m not naive and I know that racism in the work place does happen.  In the parker poem it talks about how all black people don’t share the same feelings and don’t say no offense or I’m sorry if someone else does something wrong or upsets you and them just so happen to be a person of color. Just because one person or a group of people do something wrong doesn’t mean it should bring down the entire race of the people that did something wrong.  In the beginning of the poem he starts off and says, “Forget that I am black”. Then in the next line it says, “Second, you must never forget that I’m black”.  Parker wants people to not see him as a man of color and see him as the man he is, but he also doesn’t want you to forget who he really is, and being black is a part of who he is.

In class I want to hear about other people’s thoughts and opinions on what they thought of the pieces.  I want to talk more about the parker poem, and the first two lines of it. I’m not sure if I may have understood it fully.

ALL ABOUT ME!!

Well to start off my name is Sarah Tolson, and I am a sophomore at Rhode Island College. As most of you I am an elementary education major and specializing in special Ed.  I have lived here in Rhode Island for about 10 years now, but I was originally born and raised in Cincinnati Ohio. Ohio is where all my family lives and I miss it terribly. I will always have a mid-west attitude. If you don’t really know what that means, it means that I just go with the flow, and always put others before myself, and avoid confrontation as much as possible.  I loved living in Cincinnati, but my dad works for Hasbro Toy Company and he was asked to transfer to Rhode Island before they closed down the shop in Ohio. Being the kid of a man who works at Hasbro is amazing!! My brothers and I always got free toys. I remember back to when I was in the third grade and when Pokémon was big, Hasbro was putting on a Pokémon school for the employee's kids. So my dad enrolled me and my brother Greg and we had to study the different Pokémon and the different things they transformed into, in the end we had a big graduation ceremony and we all became Pokémon trainers. That’s just one a many different things that I got to do, because my dad worked for Hasbro.
I am also apart of a sorority here at Rhode Island College and I absolutely love it. The organization is called Lambda Chi, and we have an animal rights and welfare based philanthropy. We are only currently at 13 active members but we are now in our rush and are getting ready to select our gamma class. This sorority is what really helped me get through my freshmen year at college, I now have 15 new best friends and that number continues to grow every semester. :)