Monday, February 7, 2011

Accepting Differences

The subjects of the readings were things that I can personally relate to. Growing up in an international community, I was completely familiar with the ethnic concerns Judith Ortiz Cofer brought up in “The Story of My Body.” Our school was predominantly of Asian ethnicity, though it was divided between Koreans, Taiwanese, Singaporeans, Asian-Americans, Asian-Canadians, Asian-Australians, etc. Talk of racial, ethnic, and national differences was commonplace and many of my friends and I used our differences in good-natured jokes with each other. This reading, rather than reforming my perspective on differences, instead reminded me of how I have handled differences in my own life.

The readings dealing with gender took me back to my tenth grade health class when we studied gender roles in society and watched an expository documentary on the media’s influence in depicting the ideal, called “Tough Guise.” I remember having my eyes opened and for the first time I started to look at the media with challenging eyes. “Never Just Pictures” is a piece that would have fit perfectly with our unit in that course. Susan Bordo doesn’t hesitate to bash on the devastating effects of the media’s glamorization of unhealthy body compositions. I am interested in reading her book The Male Body, as it focuses on an element of media misrepresentation that I often feel is overlooked: the need for men to fit their own sometimes-unrealistic physical ideal.

What both of these texts bring to light is that everyone is different and that it is mandatory that we each be willing to accept this fact. Once we can do so, life will most certainly be better for all parties involved and a lot self-hate, frustration, and insecurity will be done away with, allowing room for beautiful individuality to flourish.

In the texts dealing with class, I found the series of Polaroid-style photos by Jim Goldberg to be particularly poignant. They capture elements of life that I was never truly exposed to until I was much older. When you view poverty in a foreign culture, you view it with an unintended distance—it’s not your people, it’s them. Life isn’t like this back home. The photos reminded me of the culture shock that I went through in the beginning of my mission when I served in Brooklyn, New York. For the first time in my life, I was living among, and interacting with, people of a lower economic class. I had always lived a privileged life in a gated international community, sheltered from the harsh realities of the vast majority of people’s lives. Yet in New York, people in this station were my friends, my neighbors, the guys who hung out on our corner, the people who sat next to me on the bus, the people who shared the hanging bar on the subway with me. Goldberg’s photos remind me that my life is blessed, but that a blessed is not the only way to find happiness.

In order to create respectful, authentic work, it is important to have legitimate exposure to other cultures. Especially in the Midwest, the subcultures that exist in major urban areas are almost non-existent and the only exposure we have is through the often-biased media. Like Nikki S. Lee, to get to know a culture, we must enter it, become familiar with its customs and bywords. Only then can we represent it faithfully because we will have cultivated a love for its people.

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