I think that the bond between sexuality and religion is an unbreakable one. In the times of the Renaissance, bishops believed that a man was closest to God when climaxing during sexual intercourse. This is another fact that I find true; God does indeed have a place in the bedroom. However, the thing I do disagree with is the belief that he is only accepting of straight sex. Homosexuality is not a new occurrence, or one even uniquely human. Other species such as penguins and dolphins will mate for life with a member of their own gender, meaning that humanity is not alone in its affinity for homosexuality.
But what this argument does make me think about is where these beliefs came from in the first place. One cannot truly understand Christianity unless you look at it through the lens of the Roman Empire. Its creation and growth all took place during the reign of the Romans, and they weren’t exactly kind to Christians at first. Many emperors persecuted and even rounded up Christians, and as a result, Christians weren’t exactly big fans of Rome either. I mean think about it, Pontius Pilate was a Roman, and so were the men who made Jesus carry the cross to his own crucifixion. Another fact was that Romans were pretty big fans of sodomy. Many aristocratic Romans agreed that sex with their young boys was better than any woman in the empire. And when your enemies are bragging about how great sex with other men is, it will obviously be something you point out when confronting them. I believe that the Christians were trying to differ themselves from the extravagances and lavishness of the Roman lifestyle, and in doing so took their oaths of penance and denounced the act of sodomy as unholy. I highly, highly doubt that God took time out of his busy schedule to tell humanity that this one specific act is totally wrong. If you’re really that strict on religion, you would know God creates each of us in his own image. In his own image. What this means is that those people who are born homosexuals, who knew they were gay before they were in second grade, are also made in God’s image. So what does that mean? Probably that God is a little gay.
That conclusion may anger some people, but the conclusion that angers me even more is that you cannot be religious and also support homosexuality; people believe that it is exclusively one or the other. This is just not the case. In fact many of the people I know who are most religious are also highly tolerant of gays. And that is because they are the ones truly following the message of Jesus Christ: love everyone. Do not discriminate or dominate, just cherish and embrace. Whether gay or straight, we are all God’s children, and only someone with true clarity would be able to see that.

I think that the take home message in this lecture was that fear is something that controls us in today’s society. I think that this is a very true statement, but it is also not anything new. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that fear is one of the driving forces that created society in the first place. Early society was a terribly brutal place, one where people killed each other frequently. It was out of this fear of death that people began to come together and form society, in order to leave this “state of nature”, where no society existed.
In the state of nature, John Locke, a famous philosopher, established the fact that men can and will resort to violence, but once a man has used aggressive force on another without a common authority, Locke believes it is no longer the state of nature at all, but rather a state of war. Locke offers his distinction between the two in his book, when he says that, “Men living together according to reason without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of Nature. But force, or a declared design of force upon the person of another, where there is no common superior on earth to appeal to for relief, is the state of war.”
After making this distinction, Locke goes on to say that civil society is the remedy for the problems of the state of war, but that absolute control is not a fitting solution for this problem. He argues that men will be “scarce to condemn themselves for injustices if they can commit such injustices on their brother in the first place”. What this means is that essentially society was begotten by war on one another. The only way that a just society can be formed in Locke’s eyes is with an unbiased judge to handle breaches of the law. This unbiased judge must be separate from the ruling, or executive, branch, and cannot be influenced by anyone else in his or her decisions. Only in this scenario will true justice be achieved; and justice is one of the utmost goals that civil society has to offer. And that is how fear created our society, and also helped to refine it into what it is today. And even despite all the problems that are rampant in our society, fear of common authority is what keeps us together. Were there no retribution for our wrongs, society would surely collapse under the weight of its sinners and dredges. So I guess what I think the take home message is that fear is bad in large doses, but without it we would never survive. It keeps us alert and aware, and without it our trusting would be our undoing.

You may recognize my hometown of Hazleton from the newspapers, as it has become rather infamous both around the state and the country for our recent anti-immigration laws. These laws were eventually struck down as unconstitutional, but the fact that they ever existed at all gives you an insight into the community I am a part of. However, despite all the racism and negativity going on around me, my mother raised me with the idea that all people are the same, and that skin color or national origin has no bearing on the person in front of you. And it was these beliefs that led me to meet my best friend, Mr. Andre Fisher.
The Fishers moved in down the road when I was thirteen years old, and we became fast friends. It wasn’t until we went back to school that year that I even realized what people thought of him, and the responses I got were shocking. People that I had known since kindergarten would not be associated with me because I was “friends with that nigger”; one of the only fistfights I was ever in started when a group of boys were calling him “Uncle Tom” because of his white adoptive family. But I stuck by my friend through thick and thin, determined to remain steadfast in my beliefs. We both graduated high school still as the best of friends, and not long after that he sat me down and told me that he had enlisted to join the U.S. Army.
I was saddened by the loss of my friend, but I also realized that this was what he wanted, and who am I to prevent him from serving his country. So Andre shipped out to South Korea, and we promised to keep in touch. But one day, I received an unusual collect call in Korean. I pressed one, and then heard Andre’s voice on the other line. “You have to go tell my family that I’ve been arrested, and that I’m innocent. They said a black man robbed a taxi driver, and they must’ve just picked up the first one they saw. I had twelve bucks on me, but the driver was robbed of almost two hundred. Please help, Bill. Please.” In a panic, I told the Fishers what had happened, and they were on the first plane to Seoul. Once they arrived, they found a legal system in South Korea that was not only biased towards natives, but also hostile towards minorities, especially those of African descent. He was placed in the worst prison cells, held without bail, and was refused a translator for many of his proceedings. And for all the power the U.S. Army says it has, they could do nothing. I had lost my best friend, and it was all because of the color of his skin.

Rather than the typical drug dogs and metal detectors, my high school decided to go for a different approach to curb drug use in school: drug testing for all athletes. That meant that in order to play a sport at my high school, you had to submit to a drug test upon signing up as well as random testing throughout the season. Obviously these tests look for performance enhancing drugs such as steroids, but what they usually catch people for is marijuana or other recreational drugs.
I most certainly agree that every athlete should be tested for steroids; not only do they provide an unfair advantage, they are extremely dangerous in inexperienced hands. But, this test never caught one person for steroid usage. Every positive test during the two years this policy was active caught someone for using marijuana. And that just isn’t fair. Drug tests are designed specifically to catch people smoking weed. I knew people who did drugs like cocaine and ecstasy constantly, and they could do them every weekend with the knowledge that they’d have clean piss by Monday. However, it sometimes takes up to 30 days for marijuana to pass through your system. Now you tell me, which drugs are more important to test for, cocaine or marijuana?
Another flaw with this system is the fact that is punishes only those who attempt to do something with their lives. They were sure as hell not testing the lowlifes who had no interest whatsoever in sports, and who were dealing the drugs in the first place. No, they were only concerned with those people who were representing the school athletically; and that is unfair. What this system did was scare off those people on the fringe of sports. I had friends who were the last guys on the bench in baseball and eventually decided that they’d rather sit on their couch stoned than sit on the baseball bench another year. And that is not what any drug system sets out to accomplish. They just made this kid quit the only extracurricular activity he participated in because he smoked a little weed.
This policy was the first of its kind in Pennsylvania, and as you would guess, the ACLU had a few things to say about it. They argued that it was unfair in placing the pressure only on the kids who are already exceeding. You already must be passing every class to play sports, so if we’re passing our classes, who cares what we do on our own time? This law is still making its way through the courts, and the ACLU plans to take this case all the way. It looks as though there will be amendments to the policy, hopefully some that make it random for all students rather than just the ones who are doing positive things for their school.

I think it is totally unfair that many people have to deal with race from the time they are born, while most people do not even realize the salience of the race issue until they are much older. It is the responsibility of each and every individual to do their part in making sure that every person in every part of the globe is trying to work together on this issue.
For example, after the creation of the barrier along the 10th parallel, the British colony of Sudan enjoyed a relative time of peace. The uneasy divide held both sides at bay for many years, until nationalism in the North began to put some stress on the topic of what the British would do with Sudan. At the time, Britain was hemorrhaging colonies, and the Sudanese knew that their turn in line for independence would surely come soon. However, there was not such a movement for independence in the South. They knew that the North’s sense of nationalism was founded on Muslim and Arabic principles, and they feared the intrusion of the North and these ideals into their affairs. This sentiment led the North to accuse the South of treason against Sudan, with the term “loyalist” constantly being used to describe Southerners.
However, at the poorest point in Germany’s history, they still probably had it better than most Sudanese citizens do in the 21st century. Sudan’s poverty levels have continued to spike with each new conflict, and the education levels are pathetically low, especially in the South. As I mentioned earlier, under divided rule both Germany and Sudan had most of their economies on one side of the wall: West in the case of Germany and North for the Sudan. But where West Germany subsidized the East and provided assistance programs, the North Sudanese left the South to starve. This lack of compromise or cooperation surely angered the people living in the South, perhaps prompting their retaliation on the economically dominant North. So where did the conflict go next? Only a few years ago, the Sudan experienced the Darfur conflict, a genocide of people in the Sudan based on both religious and ethnic lines. This violence has reached an uneasy ceasefire, but the differences between North and South Sudan continue to persist. As a result, the government of the North allowed the people of the South to vote on the issue of secession. In this vote, held only a few months ago, over 98% of the South Sudanese people chose to secede from the North. South Sudan has gained international recognition and will become its own independent nation on July 9, 2011.
Hopefully, these and other conflicts illustrate the point that many places across the globe are much more prone to these issues than others. These areas are sensitive to the race and ethnicity issue, and as a result are hotbeds of racial tension. If people can realize that there are places far worse than their own, perhaps they can start working to improve their own neighborhoods and lives. And when that happens, they can pass on their knowledge to the younger generations, in the hopes that they might improve race relations both in those foreign places and at home.

Living in America, something that I have noticed is that most people form their opinions on war from media reports and the rhetoric of the US government. They usually take very little time to examine the issues at hand or look at the other side of the argument; if America is involved in a conflict they support them whole-heartedly, no matter what. This is a habit that I find silly and immature. People are no as concerned with the truth so much as hearing what they want to hear. And I guess this is the thing that surprised me so much; the problem isn’t really that people can’t find the truth, it’s that they are willfully ignorant toward what’s really happening.
It is so easy for us Americans to be ignorant because of all we have. What it comes down to is the fact that it is near impossible for an average American to picture what it is like to live in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. The point I’m trying to make is that Sam is asking us to look through the lens of these people; but I don’t think we can do it. I also believe that the situation is far too complex to be looked at hypothetically; I’m not sure you could accurately say what you would or would not do unless it actually happened. People are so easy to convince that they would become insurgents; the real truth is that people overseas are far too scared of American soldiers to become insurgents. Most of the innocent civilian deaths are the families of known or suspected terrorists. Look at Osama bin Laden. There were four other deaths in that compound on the night that bin Laden was killed. They were unfortunate, yes, but also necessary in order to capture one of the most dangerous men alive. They just go to prove that the other side of the argument comes with “what if” scenarios as well. Yes, there are plenty of horrid statistics that make Americans appear as ruthless monsters, but again, it is impossible to say what you would do unless you’ve seen what these people have seen.
But, like I said, I think it is impossible for Americans to put themselves in more unfortunate shoes, and because of this, I think they should just stay out of the business altogether. People try to act like they know everything, when the real truth is that they know nothing about what’s actually going on. Maybe if people realized this fact, they would be more accepting of others, and perhaps more understanding of the different circumstances we all possess. And if we can do that, than we’ve truly accomplished our goal anyway.

After reflecting on the past semester in Soc 119, I realized that most of the race relations that we have spoken of concern physical differences. Whether it is geography or skin color or whatever, there seems to be an external reason why people hate members of another race. What I am interested in are the people who discriminate based on internal factors: namely religion or sexuality. These people see someone who may look and act exactly like them, but they hate them because of what they are, be it a Jew, a Muslim, a gay, whatever. What I wish to learn is what drives people to hate along these lines?
For example, take the Israel and Palestine conflict. These are two groups of people from a similar region of the world, who share many of the same things, but their religion keeps them forever divided. This sort of brings me back to the creation of race. The Europeans decided to create these races and place one above another; but these were not the first people they discriminated against. Before the Europeans scorned Africans and Asians, they were too busy discriminating and killing each other. I guess what that means is that there’s a certain element of that that will never go away, no matter what happens with external racism. People are just bigoted and ignorant; people don’t have to be black or brown to be discriminated against. I guess you would call this cultural racism rather than your more traditional racism that lies along “true” race lines.
And there is the issue of homosexuality. These people are in almost every single way exactly like you and me: someone’s sexual preference does not define who they are. Gay people will get offended if you refer to them as a “gay guy”. I had a friend whom I once let that slip to and he responded quickly with a “hey, what if I started calling you straight guy everywhere?” Honestly, it was the first time I had thought about that, and he was absolutely right. There were so many more interesting things about my friend than the fact he was gay; why should that be the only one that people focus on?
I believe that this all stems from the fact that people fear things and people that are different from them. They don’t know how to react, they don’t know what to say, so they just write them off and avoid them as much as possible. Such is the way of racism. Because there are plenty of racists who won’t throw slurs out at you; in fact, the closet racists are the most dangerous ones. What they need to realize is that they probably have way more in common than they think.

My uncle was the man who taught me to play chess. He told me his father taught him at a very early age, and when he found out little eight year old me didn’t know the rules, he knew he had to teach me right then and there. I loved the game, and even though he beat me every time I knew that I had found a new favorite uncle. On the way home that day though, I asked my mom curiously, “why is Uncle Cecil black but everyone else in the family is white?” She froze, unsure of how she should approach the issue. She did it very delicately, and I never once questioned it ever again. What I would later find out is that their marriage was not a storybook one.
My aunt and uncle met while they were living in Boston in the early 1960’s, a time of great social change. My uncle was one of a handful of officers who were brave enough to be the first African Americans on the Boston Police Force, at a time when racial issues were hotter than a furnace. Not long after, he met my aunt and they fell in love. However, the first time my uncle met my great grandparents, they were displeased to say the least. Although they didn’t disown her or kick him out, they muttered comments under their breath and were always giving him backhanded insults. When she announced they were getting married, my great grandfather threatened to boycott it. He was eventually convinced to come, but the issue of interracial marriage was a big one.
While my uncle was on the force, he was often teased by his black friends about how he was “trying to be white” by becoming a cop and marrying a white woman. They would call his kids “coffee babies” and throw insults his way now and again. It appeared that both people were being barraged from every side, how could a marriage survive that kind of stress? The answer is love. Those two people never stopped loving each other for one second, and they stayed married until the day my uncle died. Honestly, I’m both happy and proud to have a black side of my family. At the very least it makes things interesting, because most people wouldn’t believe I’m related to some of the people that I am. They are nice normal people who live the same middle class existence that my family and me do. There is nothing awkward or foreign about interracial marriage, and it is a practice to be encouraged rather than discouraged. If my aunt and uncle could make it work fifty years ago under the circumstances they did, there’s no reason for it to be a problem in today’s day and age.

With regards to racial quotas and affirmative action, I believe that they are part of a flawed system that is acting as reverse racism. I think that simply acknowledging a race as “less advantaged” than another is blatant racism, whether it is true or not. If you are asking the question of whether or not minorities know about their privileged status when it comes to applications, the answer is most certainly yes. I feel that it would be an insult to these peoples intelligence to assume that they are unaware of plain and simple facts: as a minority, you will almost certainly have a better shot at gaining acceptance to a school than a white person with an identical application.
I actually have an excellent example for this situation, and it involves myself. One of my good friends (who is black) and I both were applying to the University of Michigan. After we were both accepted, we were planning on being roommates and having the best collegiate experience ever. But then the financial aid results came back. There was no way either of us would be able to afford the nearly fifty thousand a year that it cost. So we both sent letters of appeal to Michigan, hoping that they could help us bear the financial burden of their school. While mine came back empty, they found my friend a Martin Luther King scholarship that would cover two-thirds of his tuition. Another important thing to mention is that my SAT scores were over 400 points higher than his and our GPAs weren’t even in the same ballpark. But the university would prefer an African-American, because diversity is more important to them than some white kid who couldn’t afford it. We did not let it affect our friendship, but for a while my feelings of jealousy made me what many people would define as a racist. I felt that blacks were getting preferential treatment, and it angered me so much. It has been 150 years since slavery, and the practice was never even legal in the states involved; so why do they still get the benefits of reparation?
This just brings me back to my original point; I firmly believe that acknowledging races and separating people based on ethnicity is racism, the reason is irrelevant. I totally believe that blacks know about affirmative action and its effects on them, but from personal experience I also know that black people would prefer to make it on their own. Because if they make it on their own, they can avoid the constant mumblings behind their back about how affirmative action got them their position; not their merits. And that is because any person, black, white, or brown wants to be acknowledged for their accomplishments and achievements; not their race.

Two summers ago, I had the unique experience of being able to live in London, one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world. It was a great awakening to see people of every color and race, many that I had never encountered before. Also, during my trip I was fortunate enough to see Germany, Ireland, and Holland as well. One of the things I noticed most about London was the fact that most signs were in several different languages. Arabic, Chinese, and Portuguese are just some of the many languages you’ll find around London on restaurants, in pubs, and so on. Although everyone obviously spoke English, most people were proficient in at least one other language; apparently French is mandatory in the primary schools of London. The city just showed a remarkable amount of tolerance and diversity, and they were happier as a result. Immigration was rarely much of a topic in Parliament, as all parties generally agree that there is nothing wrong with the system in place. When you compare their system to the one here in America, you see that people here are so much more observant of people’s differences, and much quicker to make judgments based on them. The multilingual nature of London is not a bother to anyone, but in America you would hear the tirades of people telling them they had to learn English. Our Constitution was based on the principles that people could be whoever they wanted to be here. We have no official language, no official religion, and that’s why we’re the best country in the world. On paper. We need to echo the beliefs that our forefathers once held, that every man or woman is free to try and make it in America in whatever way they see fit.
But the problems are not unique to America. When I visited Holland, people were very friendly and most of them knew English well enough to communicate with me. However, Germany was a different story. I was lucky enough to have a bilingual German friend who served as my translator, but without him boy would I have been in trouble. Rather than Berlin, we were in Hamburg, a northern city that is not used to the tourism that Berlin has. I obviously did not know a word of German, and nine out of ten Germans that I encountered did not know a word of English. They also seemed to get frustrated and angry with the fact that I did not know their language. Germany is a country where your nationality and citizenship is based on bloodlines, a country where the immigration policies get tougher and tougher to curb the flow of immigrants from Middle Eastern countries like Turkey. The German people often echo the same complaints that we do here, that the immigrants are lazy and can’t or won’t learn German. Sound familiar? So although this is a problem that needs to be fixed, America is not the only country that is tough on immigrants and their language assimilation. Perhaps if Germany and America were more like Great Britain and Holland, immigration would not be such a hot button issue like it currently is.