Nepotism means favoritism, which is to give favors or benefits to a certain group of people. Like what the majority of people have posted on the web already, I agree that in a long run nepotism is not a good thing. It could harm a society and it kind of fights against equality.

Like many people said, in a short run I can see how it benefits a certain group of people in a society. For example, if our government could give more help and care to Native Americans they could have a better life then the way they are living now. Also, in international trade, we allow and always see some laws to favor poorer countries by reducing or exempting their taxes for exports. Moreover, government gives the most basic social security to poor people who do not have stable incomes and lives in the bottom of the society. We see nepotism all around us and it has been there for a long time already. Is it really right to say it is good or bad in a long run? I think it is a tough question because inequality does exist in people’s minds and it will be there for another long while. We try to use nepotism as a method to protect people who are looked down upon by other people in the society. It can be a way to cure the temporary pain; however, to seek for a long term solution I believe that education is the most important thing. I believe that people need more education on “everybody is equal” in the society; I believe that people need to realize that we all have the same rights and thus opportunities; I believe that the only way to achieve those goals is to educate those who are racist or who are against a certain group of people. Also, like I said, nepotism may actually make it even harder to achieve equality in people’s minds because accepting nepotism is already seen as a sign of poverty and vulnerability. People tend to either look down upon or pity the person who might have accepted nepotism. Thus, I believe that nepotism is not a good thing in a long run for a society. The key is not to try to solve the problem lying on the surface, but to dig out what the root cause is. We need to see if education of equality can help our society to become more cohesive and fair.

Many countries have already had the culture of nepotism for centuries, such as China. In china, the culture is if someone wants to succeed in business, he/she needs to have good people relations. This made rich people richer and poor people poorer because poor people do not have the ability to get to know the people with power and who are helpful to the business. I think that this needs to be changed, but since it has been in our culture for a long time, the reality is it is hard to achieve the goal.

I always pay attention to how people present themselves, such as the way they dress. Dressing up is not about what you wear, but how do you put different things together and make them look nice on you. It is not about what brand you wear, but more about your taste. So when I interact with people, especially guys, I do pay attention to the way they dress.

In my personal opinion, dressing down does not mean not dressing well. Some people dress in casual and they still look good. However, some people put a lot of thoughts on their outfit but they could still look ok or even worse. It is all about one person’s taste. Someone’s taste includes many aspects, such as his taste in colors, clothes, food, woman, and activities. A person with taste is what attracts me and I believe the most women. I saw some guys wore saggy pants and old t-shirt to go to a nice bar, and I accept that. However, it did show that this person does not have a good sense of taste.

Another thing about dressing up is being polite. I believe that looking nice in front of other people is a way to show respect. It means that this person prepared and spent some time before coming to see me. However, there is a line between overdressed and dressing appropriately. Girls are easily step into the overdressed zone, so can men. I have seen some guys tried very hard to look good: they put up their hair and try to copy what people wear in those TV shows. However, what others wear may not apply to them because we all look different. So, keeping a firm line between dress appropriate and overdressed is an art that people should learn through their daily lives.

Finally, when a girl dresses up but her guy dresses down (or I should say: dress bad), I think it shows something about the girl too. People say, your friend circle reflects who you are and I truly agree with that. If a girl looks nice but her boyfriend looks really dirty and lazy, it could actually say something about that girl that she may not have a good taste in man. Or, the guy must have an awesome personality to attract that girl. Thus, when I go out with my boyfriend, I always pay attention to my outfit and make sure that I look neat, not only for myself, for him but for all other people around.

However, there are some exceptions. As I have mentioned earlier, someone may not have the money or talent in dressing, or that person simply doesn’t care at all. But I cannot say that this person does not have a good taste in something else, such as art. And different people have different taste, what I see as “good” may not be others’ tastes.

As a Chinese, I consider my family and myself very open minded. Unlike other traditional Chinese family, my parents are relatively easy-going with my choice of boyfriend or husband. Although my parents always say that it is ok to find someone who is not Chinese, and that the most important thing is the happiness of myself, I know that part of them preferring me to find a guy who is from China or at least has a Chinese background. So for me, I say that the most obstacle of dating is the family culture.

Many western people may find it ridiculous because they think that you dating someone is your business, not your parents. However, for most Asians, even Arabic families, marrying someone is a family business. We need to consider not only myself but also our family, such as if our parents would like this person or not. The reason behind that is because of the high respect we have for our parents. In Chinese culture, we say that our parents give us lives and keep us alive till teenage; we should return their love and effort put in us. The level of respect we have for our parents are so high that many western people don’t understand. For example, one of my American friend had his parents coming visit him. He made them an airbed and he himself slept on the bed. When I heard about it, I felt sad about the way he treated them. How could he let them sleep on an airbed? If it was me, I would let my parents sleep on my bed and I sleep on the floor. This is just an example of how much respect we have for our parents and how much I consider about them than ourselves sometimes. We grew to learn that being happy is not the only goal of life, but let us all be happy is the ultimate goal. And to achieve that, someone needs to sacrifice for something. The parents sacrificed when we were babies, and when they are old, we will need to sacrifice for them to make them proud and happy.

So come to the question again, what are some blocks in dating a different race? I think that one’s family culture definitely would influence some part of the decision. I myself is now dating an Arabic guy, who shares a total different religion and belief than me; whose family is even more traditional than mine. The situation is tough for us because we both know that our relationship isn’t going anywhere. Neither of us told our parents about our relationship because we knew what would come: “there is no future, son! You need to marry an Arabic girl.” Or “you’d better stop it now because we expect you to find someone put family benefits above everything else!”

It is interesting that my friend showed me a video called the “Waking Up Project”, which talks about people living in a world full of lies. The capitalistic countries made up all the “standards” of what beauty is and how we should live our lives. For example, in America people would choose hamburgers and pizzas over fruits and vegetables. People would be on strict diet to look thin because being thin is considered beautiful.

How does this relate to our scarce resources? We do not have enough resources here on the planet. We should use them wisely on something that does not only benefit us but also our next generations. We created all those disruptive technologies that seem to make our lives easier and better but in a long run hurt ourselves. For example, is subway really a sustaining technology or disruptive one? We used a lot of resources to build these systems that benefit us for speeder transportations but at the same time, destroyed our planet and caused more headaches than benefits. We created “tasty” fast foods with bunch of chemicals that eventually cause cancers and tumors. Many things in this world right now are illusions. In a recent beauty contest, I saw the girls all look alike: with high noses, big eyes and thin and tall bodies. Since when did people start to perceive being tall and thin is the standard of beauty? Since when did we have this idea that big eyes look better than small ones? Since when did we forget about giving back to our mother land but to rob it off and try to get the most out of it?

Until we realize that all the decisions we made so far were based on illusions, it is very hard to save ourselves from getting closer to the dead end. It is urgent for us, the human beings to realize that we do not need fried French fries when we can have simple cooked potatoes. We do not need bunch of make-ups when we look beautiful naturally. We do not need subways when we can reach somewhere by simply cycling or walking. To save our scarce resources, it is not can be done by a few amount of people who cares, but the whole human beings.
Like it says in the video, the history itself depicts our evolving progress. Looking back to these past years, more and more disasters came to alert us that nature is rebelling. We did not wake up. We blamed it on coincidence. Wars started to compete for energy and resources. We did not look at ourselves to see what we can possibly do to improve our situations, instead initiating wars to fight against each other for it. This chaos going on around the world now is a sign telling that human beings are in a deep trouble. However, how many of us really see the tragedy is coming on its way? How many people out there do not care about the future? How many of us are still living in lies?

I was very moved by the lecture on Thursday about the slavery and people’s sufferings. Every time those news or documentaries about humanity or world tragedies ache my heart and make me rethink about what we know about the world, what kind of lives we are living compared to others and all the thinking make me reevaluate myself as a good person or not.

Like Karim (the guy who is in the video) said, many times people use ignorant card to avoid thinking about others. There are so many sad things going on in this world that we are not aware of. But journals and news nowadays allowed us to see the dark side of the world and pushed us to think about what we can do to help others. I don’t think that people can actually use ignorant card as an excuse anymore because we all read news and somehow heard things from others. I think the question is even if we are aware of what is going on in this world, what we can do; or rather do nothing at all.

The interesting thing is many people think that they are not the right people to care, because they are not someone who is as rich as Bill Gates or someone who has power like our president. Like that one student in class was arguing with Sam about why are we the people should care, why not others? Why should we donate when we are still struggling to create a comfortable life for ourselves? I understand that we all have issues in our lives and most of the time we just do not have that much capability to help others or to care that much. However, there is a difference between developing the kind of mercy in our heart and actually make a movement to help others when we cannot. It may sound blizzard but let me explain my thoughts:

First, we all need to work hard to make a living. We earn money that is from our effort. Many times we do not have a choice but choose the best for us. However, the point is not if we should or should not change our lifestyle dramatically to make a donation or dedicate ourselves to help others. The point is to improve the awareness of what is going on in the world. By knowing that there are some bad things happened in this world because of us, what we buy and what we demand from business, we at least would appreciate more of what we have right now. More importantly, maybe we do not have the kind of power or ability to stop slavery for now, but maybe one day, some students among us from Penn State may become our president or a successful business man. When the day comes and when we do have the power to influence, we will make the right decision because of the awareness that was developed in us.

With knowing that life is unfair and most of the time people do not have choices in their lives, I still consider myself lean toward liberal and free will.

People may believe that God will deliver goods to them, or simply luck will bring fortunes for their lives. I admit that luck may play a part of someone’s success, but most of the time it is all about someone’s own decisions and efforts. However, it is also important to realize that making the right decisions and also having the courage and strength to hold on to these right decisions are hard. And I believe this is what differentiates people.

For example, a person may be born in a poor family, raised without a proper education, and surrounded by jobless and hopeless people. However, there must be ways for the person to see the good things in the world. The person will know sooner or later that there are differences in people, in our society where some people driving Benz and some never even ride a bicycle. The person will learn from life that there is inequality. Because the person has the knowledge about the unfairness of life, the person have the choices of continually living in a desperate life and doing nothing to change it, or starting to think about ways to change his/her life. Once the person is determined to change his/her own fate, the person will also have to have the courage and strength to experience hardships and the mindset of never giving up until he/she gets what he/she wants. Of course doing it and talking about it is different and that’s why most of the people are still suffering because they lack of the strength. But how about a person lives in a poor country where everyone suffers from poverty? My argument toward that is: because everyone suffers and experiences the same problems, then there is no comparison. Or in other words, there is no a better life for that person to hope for or to fight for. (I believe there is a saying which can apply to my point: “innocence is a bless.”)

Then people would wonder how about people born in good family and have everything they need in their lives? Maybe they don’t need to do anything to fight for a better life because whatever decisions they make does not affect their living standards and good lives anyways? My response to that is: everyone has different stories. Rich people may suffer from different things that poor people may never think of. For example, I know a friend of mine who was born in a very well-of family but never experienced the real happiness. His parents were divorced and he was never taken care of by his parents. His parents offer him money but never cared about his personal life. He ended up using money to buy happiness, such as cracking drugs. What we can say about this person then? The decisions he made led him to a dead end road where his healthy is destroyed and his future is unknown.

So come to the end, I believe a person definitely has the free choice to be better off or not. But it is not as easy as the way I say it.

In the class, Sam talked about political correctness. He did not say if it is right or wrong but he did make
us to think that by being political correct, we may be unfair to others at the first place. Maybe political
correctness does not matter?

In the discussion session this week, our group brought this topic up again and we had an interesting
conversation. Some people think that political correctness makes no sense because we are who we are,
why do we need to make up all the “right” names for others? However, I personally have a different
opinion.

I think that political correctness does matter because we are human beings not apes. By saying that I
mean human beings are civilized, and we have histories, cultures, believes and sensations. We may say
something unintentionally but can potentially hurt others because we all have different preferences
of how to be called. We cannot just be like animals and do not care about it because we live in a
society with different layers. Being cautious and careful is important in socializing with each others.
Some political correctness may be not as significant as others but I believe that the intention of being
politically correct is good.

As a Chinese international student, I had an experience of someone calling me “chink”. Chink is
a VERY disrespectful word to call a Chinese descendent. Chink has been compared in degree of
offensiveness to terms such as nigger and kike. As with other ethnic slurs, associations with violence and
discrimination are often made which may amount to hate crimes. One guy of my friend’s used to greet
me saying: “Hey, what’s up chink?” I did not react at first, but when he started to say it as a habit or a
joke I was really angered by the person. So one day when he called me a chink again, I went up to his
face and busted him out in Chinese. He was so lost, confused and irritated by me. Although it is not very
nice for me to do such a thing, my point is that I believe that guy finally learnt a lesson of not to call a
Chinese person a chink in a harsh way.

Some political correctness such as “chink” is really offensive because it can be referred to a certain
history and culture. Thus by being politically correct or having the knowledge of what is not right to
call another person is necessary for us to interact with each other. However, I do see that some terms
are not exactly as aggressive as the others. Maybe if one day everyone can forget about the history
and be totally liberal and open minded about everything, we do not need political correctness at all.
Nonetheless, it is hardly possible to just forget about the culture and history, and to be totally care-free.

I think that there is a possibility of the existence of “the most beautiful race”. People may think that it is wrong to think in this way, but I believe that because everyone has different taste in beauty and preference in skin colors, there are people there unconsciously judging which group of people is more beautiful or attractive than the others. For example, some people like people with bigger eyes and curly bodies; some people like smaller eyes and petite bodies; or some people think that lighter skin colors are more attractive while others think that tanned skins make people look fitter. As the teacher mentioned in class that Turkish people were considered the most beautiful race by some sociologist. I personally kind of agree with him because I think that people from Turkey have some features from Europe and some from Asia. This makes them look exotic and different from Caucasians and Asians.

It was just my personal opinion about the most beautiful race. Some people argued that it is wrong to judge and that human beings are equal. Of course those human beings are equal but it doesn’t mean that we should consider every one as attractive as others. There is nothing wrong to identify who you are attracted to and who is not. We should all respect people in the same way but I can still hold our personal opinions about who is more beautiful than others. However, it is too general to say that Turkish people or Asians are the most beautiful race. There are extremely charming people from each ethnic group. Individuals are different after all. There are many pretty Caucasians and there are also many beautiful black girls too.

In my case, I am personally more attracted to people with darker skin colors and hair colors which usually happen to be people from Middle East or South America. As an Asian, it is not that I do not like my own ethnic group or that I think my people do not look as good as the people from other places, it is just that I am more attracted to a certain kind of people. And this kind of people happens to be from these certain areas in the world. However, I do have a lot of friends who stick with their own ethnic group and think that their people are the best of everyone else. Is there anything wrong with this kind of thoughts? I do not want to say that it is wrong but it is kind of too narrow. Many times people do not like to open up to other people who are different because they want to be comfortable in their own zones. And also because they are too shy to open up, they usually do not see the beautiful sides of people from different places.

I think of myself as an Eastern Asian. Asia includes a lot of regions and people who can look totally different. For example in the class we saw the video of “Asians all look the same” which actually tells that Asians can look differently, some are as white as Caucasians, and some are as dark as the African Americans. Easter Asians, however, in general look alike although I am not sure if it is correct to say that.

Eastern Asians, in my opinion, are people from east part of Asia, such as Japanese, Malaysians, Chinese, and Vietnamese. We have similar physical features, languages and cultures. Thus, if I was the pioneer, I would categorize people with similar cultural backgrounds and similar physical features.
The characteristics I would give to my race (Eastern Asian) are based on two aspects: physical and cultural.

Physical characteristics:
-medium to tan skin colors
-relatively thin and dark hair texture
-less hairy
-smaller bone structures
-flatter nose compared to western people. This is due to the climate in East Asia where it is not as cold as Europe
-dark eyes

Cultural characteristics:
-food: in East Asia, people usually use a lot of spices in cooking. I don’t know about the reason behind, but having been living here for a long time I noticed that western people don’t really use many spices.
-Drinks: drinking is another special thing about eastern Asian culture. People see drinking as a social interaction with others.
-wearing: people intend to wear more colorful clothes in East Asia.

Although I have listed these typical characteristics of East Asians, nowadays with the trend of globalization and crossbreeding, I think that human beings are evolving into another kind of species, which is more refined. I have heard that people who are “mix” are smarter and prettier than the others. I don’t know if it is true but crossbreeding definitely has a significant impact on human beings. And this makes categorizing each other into a certain kind of group impossible because everyone in the future may have a little bit of each other. Also, as we learned in class that race was developed to classify people as superior or low class. But with the economic advances, worldwide people are living in similar conditions which we are all seemed as a part of the labor forces. There are rarely slaves and “low class” people. This economic improvement and technological advances made human society as a whole group instead of many.
Overall, I do not think the racial categories today can simply categorize people into specific groups with identical characteristics. Especially when the technology today enables world merging and crossbreeding, it makes it impossible to put people into a specific group. Everyone is different in their own ways and I believe there is still a long way to abandon all the prejudgments and discrimination we have today in our society.

SOC 119, Yan Tong