Over a month ago, there was a shooting a block away from where we lived. Someone had shot at a police officer. Helicopters hovered over our neighborhood, big guys with rifles came around. We couldn't leave our house for a couple hours. It felt really, really scary and we had to hide in our house. The police came and asked my dad questions, if we knew of anybody or had seen anything. It felt we were under siege.
In True Notebooks, the characters are all in there because they committed crimes. Just like them, we were stuck somewhere and couldn't leave. However, these guys were actually convicted of the crimes, where we were almost victims. We were being held wrongly, like we were being held in lockdown.
Christian Dior made a racist advertisment because the white women showed pride, while the Asian women sat back in the shadows. They were being held back just because they are Asian, just like True Notebooks characters are all getting punished for just a few people's mistakes, and how everybody on our block was punished because of a few people's mistakes.
Assumptions of people are not always true because you can't just hear one side of the story. The authorities just think we're bad because we live in a certain area of the world. We were treated just like the characters in True Notebooks and the Asian women in Dior's ad, people treating us as inferior because of a generalization.
If the whole is equal to the sum of its parts than our "whole" cannot be reached until our parts are gathered and acknowledged. This blog will act as a collection, a gallery that records our “parts and particles” (our particulars) in an effort to connect the dots; to endlessly connect the dots.
Right, this is that problem/issue of limiting people to a single story.
ReplyDeleteSometimes this is more difficult--so, like Charlie said in class, a lot depends on contexts and what kind of nurturing and environment you are pur into. If that is true, some of the people who are punished are also victims (or their own contexts). Do you see this kidn of complexity in your book? Do you see criminals who maybe experienced some kind of victimization by being limited or restricted to a lifestyle that caused them to become criminals?