My Own Twist on Race

Yesterday as I was watching South Park, I saw an episode that really related to what we are doing in class. In this episode, Cartman hurt Token who is black. Because Token is black it was labeled as a hate crime. Therefore, instead of only being reprimanded for his actions, he was sent to juvie. Then as the episode continued the Stan, Kyle, and Token went to the mayor and petitioned for Cartman's release because they said that by creating hate crimes they were actually discriminating against the minority group by saying it is because they are different that they were hurt. I feel this is very true because in some cases people are driven to hurt others because of a disagreement but then others will say it is because the other person was a minority. In the end they ended up convincing the mayor that all people were really quite the same and that there are always disagreements. I also saw an episode of the Chappelle Show. In this episode, Dave was acting as a member of the KKK, and he took off his mask. When everyone stared at him and told him that he was black he was furious and said that he always thought he was white. I felt that this was similar to our class discussion because in reality your race is not really what you look like but instead your daily cultural actions and how you see yourself. For example, I personally see myself as an Eastern European, but as Sal said in  class, I am also technically Asian because of my Russian roots. However, in the end of my episode of the Chappelle Show, Dave divorced his wife for being a black sympathizer.

Monopoly

In class we did a monopoly project in which everyone started in a social class and they played to see if any one moved up in social class. As the Lower Upper Class (New Money), I found it to be quite easy to maintain my social class, but I could not move anywhere near the wealth of the Old Money because they owned so many spaces on the monopoly boared to the 4 or 5 that I owned. However, I did find that in the end of the game I nearly doubled my money so I did earn a slightly better life style. However, I also noticed that the people in the lower classes had a lot of difficulty earning money because they had to constantly pay money for landing on spaces that were already owned by others. Therefore, our person in the Lower class ended up having a negative amount of money. After their first or second trip around the board and they ended up with more money in the negatives than the amount of money they began with in the positives. I personally found it to be quite amazing of how difficult it is to change social classes and think that it is also kind of sweet that I was lucky enough to be stuck in a social class that will provide me with a happy future since I go to such a highly ranked school.