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Cultural sensitivity Essay
Cultural sensitivity essay introductions
Cultural sensitivity essay introductions
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It’s weird to think that restoring art is an art form in itself. But spending hours analyzing the flaws in a painting and devoting countless more to mending minor details can hardly be considered anything else. It takes a steady hand and a meticulous focus to repair the damages and reinstate a sense of respect towards something degraded by time. Much like a painting conservator reviving a masterpiece, Firoozeh Dumas, an Iranian author and social commentator, peels back layers of accumulated stereotypes in order to critique the ways culturally ignorant American citizens respond to unfamiliar names. In “The F Word,” an excerpt from her memoir, she shares her immigration experience and stresses the value of diversity and respect for cultural heritage. Look no further than the first paragraph of Dumas’s piece to observe her consistent attention to detail while crafting her …show more content…
argument. She begins by explaining that her cousin’s name Farbod, which means greatness in Farsi, translated to Farthead in the mind of an American schoolchild (para. 1). This juxtaposition of Farbod’s name in the two nations illustrates the lack of tolerance for other cultures in the United States. She wants those who are mocking Iranians to realize that it is unfair to label an entire race of people based on the actions of a group of demented terrorists. How would Americans feel if their entire country was judged based on the behavior of Donald Trump? The contrast between Farbod and Farthead is stark. Dumas continues on to pose the rhetorical question, “How could our parents have ever imagined that someday we would end up in a country where monosyllabic names reign supreme?” (para. 2). When she asks this, it conjures up a scenario where two Iranian parents decide to name their child Frankie instead of Firoozeh, just in case they decide to immigrate to a Western nation. Dumas’ prejudiced audience realizes the reality of her situation and how ridiculous it would be if their own parents had decided to name them Hung so they would fit in if a need arose to move to China. Dumas’ readers begin to pry open their closed minds and empathize with her; she is sanding down their dispositions and prepping them to be revarnished. In the subsequent lines, Dumas includes a simile comparing foreign phonetic sounds to spices like those once exchanged along the Silk Road. After stating that America would be a greater country if its citizens could learn to pronounce “kh” or “gh” correctly, she notes, “It’s like adding a few new spices to the kitchen pantry. Move over cinnamon and nutmeg, make way for cardamom and sumac” (para. 2). Just as a chef must incorporate ingredients from around the world, Americans must utilize more throaty sounds in their speech. Because cardamom and sumac are both specific to the Middle East, the spice cabinet symbolizes the importance of absorbing more knowledge about other cultures. Dumas is emphasizing that acceptance is about welcoming diversity and blending other lifestyles with the cosmopolitanism of the United States. After explaining her struggles as “Firoozeh,” Dumas discovers an entirely new problem when she decides to westernize her name: her peers speak openly about their animosity towards the Middle East. Hearing Americans consistently bash Iranians was like “having those X-ray glasses that let you see people undressed, except that what I was seeing was far uglier than people’s underwear” (para. 10). Reading this analogy is a direct blow to her racially oblivious audience. She is calling out the people who unknowingly ridiculed her people to her face; she is pinpointing the flaws that must be mended in an ancient canvas. The most caustic part of this picture is her opinion that the stereotyping and malice of Americans is more hideous than any undergarment. The images she invokes of withered grandmothers in floral bloomers certainly leave a sour impression. Dumas’ word choice is strategic and highly effective in forcing her narrow-minded audience to see how repulsive their intolerance is. Another change Dumas observes is an increase in job offers when she uses Julie on applications instead of Firoozeh (para.
11). Because Dumas provides a specific example of discrimination in the workforce, it helps her argument feel more concrete. She disproves everyone in denial of bigotry in America by pointing out that she has experienced it in her own life. Additionally, Dumas shares an anecdote about a receptionist calling her in for blood work as “Fritzy” and then again as “Fritzy, Fritzy Dumbass” when she refuses to respond to the mispronunciation (para. 15). The receptionist’s arrogance led her to believe that because Dumas had a foreign name, and possibly was not fluent in English, that she was unintelligent. It is like saying a Picasso is worthless because it was not painted in America. Dumas illustrates that disrespect for her name’s heritage is unavoidable, even in a professional environment like a doctor’s office. She wants those who hold the same mindset as the receptionist to understand that their steely remarks are like thousands of paper cuts that together form a deep
wound. That is what Dumas stresses about the power of bias: it is inescapable. In America, it does not matter if an immigrant is from India or Mexico, they face discrimination on a daily basis. Stroke by stroke, Dumas carefully constructs her argument to mend the damages her people have suffered and urge foreigners to avoid the impulse to judge someone based on their name. With each detail, she emphasizes the value of accepting other cultures into the American “spice cabinet.” After all, a spoonful of sumac helps the malice go down.
people of different ethnicities. Such harm is observed in the history of North America when the Europeans were establishing settlements on the North American continent. Because of European expansion on the North American continent, the first nations already established on the continent were forced to leave their homes by the Europeans, violating the rights and freedoms of the first nations and targeting them with discrimination; furthermore, in the history of the United States of America, dark skinned individuals were used as slaves for manual labour and were stripped of their rights and freedoms by the Americans because of the racist attitudes that were present in America. Although racist and prejudice attitudes have weakened over the decades, they persist in modern societies. To examine a modern perspective of prejudice and racism, Wayson Choy’s “I’m a Banana and Proud of it” and Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Pretty Like a White Boy: The Adventures of a Blue-Eye Ojibway” both address the issues of prejudice and racism; however, the authors extend each others thoughts about the issues because of their different definitions, perspectives, experiences and realities.
Claude M. Steele is the author of “ Whistling Vivaldi”, which mainly represents that the meaning of identity contingencies and stereotype threat, and how can these effect people’s ideas and behaviors. By writing this article, Steele tries to make people know exist of identity contingencies. Gina Crosley-Corcoran, who is a white woman suffered the poverty in her childhood. Through describing her miserable experiences in parallel construction to motivate readers sympathize her, moreover approving that she can as a powerful evidence for affirming the impact of identity contingencies. Crosley-Corcoran admits the white privilege really exist in some way in her article “ Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person”, and white privilege
The example Sue gives is to say “a Chinese-American, that he speaks English well” (para 10 sue). The hidden message is that unconsciously you are putting an image to a person without finding out the whole truth. This is racism to it base core, putting a group into an image that is not truth for all. Coates give examples of situation where the result could had been different had the person been white instead. Obama being asked for his papers at a national new conference or Henry Louis Gate a Harvard Professor, being arrest for breaking in to his own home. These are two extreme case of judgments based on the skin of the person and not on who they are. We know that these action was commit by people who can be said hold some sort of influenced. Being Donald Trump a wealthy business man and a cop. We except them to make correct judgement due to the position they hold, one holds a company, the other the images of order. So for having these people being the one to commit these acts it points out how racism is still in our society it just we don’t see it like that. Coates shows his anger for this being truth by stating “in large part because we were never meant to be part of America
In Audre Lorde’s bildungsroman essay “The Fourth of July” (1997), she recalls her family’s trip to the nation’s capital that represented the end of her childhood ignorance by being exposed to the harsh reality of racialization in the mid 1900s. Lorde explains that her parents are to blame for shaping her skewed perception of America by shamefully dismissing frequent acts of racism. Utilizing copious examples of her family being negatively affected by racism, Lorde expresses her anger towards her parents’ refusal to address the blatant, humiliating acts of discrimination in order to emphasize her confusion as to why objecting to racism is a taboo. Lorde’s use of a transformational tone of excitement to anger, and dramatic irony allows those
In “Citizens: An American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine the audience is placed in a world where racism strongly affects the daily American cultural and social life. In this world we are put as the eyewitnesses and victims, the bystanders and the participants of racial encounters that happen in our daily lives and in the media, yet we have managed to ignore them for the mere fact that we are accustomed to them. Some of these encounters may be accidental slips, things that we didn’t intend to say and that we didn’t mean yet they’ve managed to make it to the surface. On the other hand we have the encounters that are intentionally offensive, things said that are
The name of this essay is “In Praise of the F Word” by Mary Sherry. It’s about how the education system has failed. How it just pushes students through to graduation, without them actually learning the material. This is an argumentative essay. The purpose is for Mary to explain to her audience; of teachers, parents, and students, that “We must review the threat of flunking and see it as it really is- a positive teaching tool” (560). The context of this essay is “Tens of thousands of eighteen-year-olds will graduate this year and be handed meaningless diplomas” (559).This essay is a successful argumentative essay Because of her appeal to reason threw the examples form her sons’ story, her students’ stories, and how the education system fails in general.
Everyone had to prove they were independent, capable, and willing to integrate into the cultural melting pot with its own identity of hard work, grit, and determination which established and fostered success in American society. But, not everyone who chooses to take the adventure and risk associated with becoming American wishes to share in this identity. Many feel it necessary to shun the American identity and observe it with a level of disdain. Disregarding the reasons themselves or previous generations may have immigrated to America for. In the short story “Mericans”, Sandra Cisneros illustrates this concept through a character in the story. “The awful grandmother knits the names of the dead and the living into one long prayer fringed with the grandchildren born in that barbaric country with its barbaric ways. (Cisneros)”. In the story it is later identified the children in reference were indeed born in the United States. “Awful grandmother” has an incredibly low opinion of the society in which her grandchildren were born. Barbaric, let’s take a look at that word shall we—“without civilizing influences; uncivilized; primitive (barbaric)”. The detriment of that perception seems to be counterproductive to the melting pot concept of the United
This book addresses the issue of race all throughout the story, which is while it is probably the most discussed aspects of it. The books presentation is very complex in many ways. There is no clear-cut stance on race but the book uses racist language. The racist language durin...
“Who am I?” (Thomas 415). Many ask themselves this relevant question in times of self-doubt or ambivalence. Leona Thomas asks this question in her essay entitled, “Black and White.” As the child of a black father and a white mother, Thomas finds herself in a racial dilemma. Society punishes Thomas for being “mixed.” Through the use of the literary techniques of pathos, logos, and inductive reasoning, Thomas effectively persuades the reader that society should look beyond one’s mixture. She shows that racial orientation should not determine how a person is perceived by society, and that the people in society should stop being racist to one another.
Racism is a huge problem that faces the American society today. Racial segregation is an important case for a lot of people but not all of them on the same side of this. For example, Florence Wagman Roisman, an associate professor at the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis, who is against racial segregation and expresses her opinion in her article “Is Integration Possible? Of Course …,” in Poverty and Race, January/February 2000. On the other side of this case supporting racial segregation is Samuel Francis ,An iconoclastic anti-capitalist columnist, wrote the article “NAACP Recognizes Integration’s Failure” in the Conservative Chronicle, July 23, 1997, This paper intends to prove that Roisman uses more rhetoric tools and more effectively to make her argument convincing. She uses ethos to prove racial separation is unacceptable, logos to prove segregation is inconsistent with civil democracy and pathos to prove that by segregation people would miss the opportunities of great discoveries.
a. The “invisibility” of the Racial Contract to whites, and its visibility to nonwhites, p.110.
A movie American History X (1988) deals with white supremacy and racism. We can see a variety of racial representation in this movie. We’re going to see implicit racial associations and racist stereotypes seen in the film first with the framework of John Russell’s discussion in his research “Race as Ricorso: Blackface(s), Racial Representation, and the Transnational Apologetics of Historical Amnesia in the United States and Japan,” examine the background and arguments on race in the movie, and see the editorial point of view of the film maker at last.
In the first Chapter of the book ‘A Different Mirror’ by (Takaki, 1993) the author embarks on a descriptive narrative that tries to elaborate the concept of a multiracial America. The chapter begins with the author taking a taxi ride in which he is subjected to racial discrimination. The taxi driver questions the author’s origin owing to the fact that his English is perfect and eloquent. This incident prompts a discussion that transpires throughout the chapter as the author tries to explain to his audience that America is a multiracial country with different ethnic groups that moved from their homelands to settle in the United States. The chapter discusses the settlement of various racial groups such as; English immigrants, African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos and the Irish.
By depicting this scene as comical rather than racist (although it certainly has undertones of that as well) the audience can allow themselves to feel more at ease with the situation Paul Beatty puts them in. However, the scene, at its core, is offensive and certainly causes the reader to second guess whether this ‘joke’ is actually ‘funny.’ Another racial ‘joke’ occurs during a Dum Dum Donuts Intellectuals meeting where one of the characters, Foy Cheshire, is discussing removing the n-word from the classic Mark Twain novel “Huckleberry Finn”. The ‘joke’ begins with Foy describing how he was unable to read the novel to his grandchildren because the n-word appears repeatedly. Thus, he decides to replace words like nigger and slave to more humane and positive titles such as “warrior” and “dark-skinned volunteer” (95).
In Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, the title character is a 16th century Moorish general of the Venetian army who, because of the cultural and historical background of the play’s setting, the playwright, and the original intended audience, is portrayed as both well-respected for his military prowess and disparaged for his race. Similarly, because of culture and historical background Mexicans in today’s American society are both well respected for maintaining strong family values and judged for taking the opportunities of native born Americans.