i'm finally reading a book that's interesting in my class. (i spent the 8 hours trying to read it today- only half through) It talks about the portrayal of blackness on television. It's interesting. there's a few interesting thoughts that come to my head as i read it.
The first is about the whole liberal vs. conservative view of government. It's quite obvious the writer is resentful of Reagan economics. he blames Reagan for ignoring the poor and shifting the nations wealth towards the rich. On the other hand, Reagan and other conservatives blame the poor for stealing the money from those who worked long and hard for their money. The deeper issue i finally realized is the struggle between needing something and deserving something.
Then something else clicked in my head- How does God see all of this? Where would He stand? I realized God would agree with both side's arguments against the other, making God not agreeing with either side. First of all, we don't deserve a thing in this world at all, so why should we be hanging on to things we don't really deserve? And also, as Dietrich Boenhoffeur says, we cannot "cheapen God's grace" for us (Paul's whole shpeel on "let us not sin so that grace may abound...). So i've concluded that what is missing from both the conservative and liberals is GRACE. If we knew how much grace we had, we wouldn't be shifting the nation's wealth even more to the rich, and the poor would work hard, knowing that what they receive is from grace (although i doubt there are that many poor people who are lazy, and if they are, they're intelligent enough to know they're screwing themselves over- they're not as dumb as we make them to be).
meh. that felt cool in my head. I guess i'm too tired to write it nicely, because it sounds stupid. well, off to my second interesting thought-
Nobody can really be happy with portrayals of race.
The writer, Herman Gray, sets up another interesting struggle. The media has two portrayals of blackness. One portrayal is the lower-class gangster who takes and is immoral in everyway you can think of. People don't like this image because it stereotypes black people. Then there's the second portrayal- the Cosby image. This is a portrayal of black people who can pursue the American dream just like white people. Cosby played a character who was an upper-middle class doctor who had a healthy family with good education. The funny thing is that people have a problem with that image too because they say it is just a black version of whiteness.
That's where i start getting a little bit annoyed. Has the normative discourse of whiteness gone so far in that being successful is a white person's cultural role? Being upper-middle class is equated with being white? A good family and good education is a white person's role? and if someone of another ethnicity achieves the same things, he or she is immediately pointed out as a sell-out?
That's the part I really don't understand. I'm starting to realize the whole idea of a "sell-out" is very undefined. It's more emotional than logical sometimes.
sometimes- yeah, there are people who have obviously "sold-out". But more often than not, we just immediately label people as sellouts before we even give them a chance.
oy. anyways, this has been a very disorganized rant. that's what you get for reading 8 hours straight.
