Fit to be Citizens? (Response)

Where in the world did Chinatown come from? (Los Angeles) I didn’t really give much thought to it until it was brought up in class. I thought it was just a place to attract tourist, to give them something diverse. Little did I know on how it came to be. While reading Fit to Be Citizens by Natalia Molina, I discovered just how Chinatown formed.

During the late 1800’s Los Angeles was a city with the majority of its citizens being white, the first immigrants who came along were Chinese. At the time there were diseases spreading and white people refused to believe that they carried it so the blame would be put on the Chinese. It was so easy for them, like the media we have today back in those days they had writers who believed that white was the superior race. Writing outrageous claims such as the Chinese are dirty people and that they carry diseases were very easy claims to make. This idea of fear and ignorance played along played a huge role.

During my reading I found three of the eight steps of genocide. The first one was classification. The cities most prominent leaders classified the Chinese as dirty by calling Chinatown, Chinatown nuisance. They would enforce negative comments to the public to make it known that others should avoid them. The next step was dehumanization. Chinese citizens were dehumanized by the 1870’s public health officials made sure that “Chinese” meant depraved and disease ridden. The last step I noticed was polarization. City officials made sure that anyone who was Chinese would be segregated from white people so that they could not be sick. They would all need to live in Chinatown so that they wouldn't spread small pox or any other disease.

I was amazed by how ignorant people were back than to believe that all Chinese people could be such a huge threat. It must have been easy to blame others because they looked different from white people and came from foreign soil. The sad part is that we still have media like this where the news will minorities look like the bad guy and focus on putting crimes that involve a Mexican or a African-American.

On the second chapter it talked about other immigrant coming into Los Angeles, referring to Japanese and Mexicans but focusing more on Mexicans. When Mexican immigrants migrated into Los Angeles they were already looked down upon for being different. They were not worthy to be treated as Americans. They were referred to as aliens which they are still being called upon today. It is a very dehumanizing name to call anyone, I don’t believe that just because someone is coming from a different country that they should be refer to as an alien, that term for immigrants should be removed. White people believed that immigrants were naturally dirty so they carried diseases “They concluded that Mexicans were a “class who habitually shunned water.” Pictures were even posted by health officials of Chinese and Mexican people, followed by a caption warning others to watch out for them because being in contact with them would make you ill. This made it easy for people to shun the immigrants, this is how these communities such as Chinatown formed to begin with because of being segregated from others.

Reading all this made me think of my life. In the neighborhood that I live in today it is full of Mexicans and I’m Mexican however I look white and I get talked down upon and dirty looks by others a lot of the times. It really makes me feel disappointed on how there is still racial tension in this world and made me ask myself, if white people never segregated different races from them would there even be communities such as Logan and Chinatown?

Reflection for Socratic seminar and readings

What does it mean to really be equal? I found myself questioning that through out the readings that I read. One thing that I noticed that the passages had in common was the themes of fear, equality, and morals/ethics. Of all stories that I read the two that made the biggest impact on me were Harrison Bergeron and The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.

While reading Harrison Bergeron I thought about the ways the government were controlling their people. On the first sentence of the story it says, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. Nobody was smarter than anybody else; nobody was better looking than anybody else.” I believe that in this story the meaning of equality meant that everyone was the same by having the same attributes but they were not equal in the sense that they each had no value.

This led me to the idea of what it really means to be equal. I made a connection to with The Ethics of Living Jim Crow. The African-Americans are not equal because they are treated poorly by the white folks. The government didn’t do anything to stop this but only embraced by having cops purposely trying to target blacks only. On page 5 it says, “Keep still! They ordered. I reached my hands higher. They searched my pockets and; packages. They seem dissatisfied when they could find nothing incriminating.” The police stopped Wright in the story without any reason only seeing that he was black so he must have been guilty. I believe that government has no moral authority to intervene in creating artificial equality. Yet they do not only in those two stories but even now.

As of 2011 gay marriage is still not completely legal. The reasons of this are because some people believe it will ruin traditional marriage, their religion says it’s wrong, and think that gay couples are not capable of being good parents because children need both a woman and man figure in their lives. To this day not everyone is equal, in fact it wasn't that long ago until 1967 where interracial couples were allowed to get married. This idea make me start thinking, well in what ways will society improve? How much longer do people have to wait until people are truly equal? What kind of things that people see as “okay” right now, how will they be seen in the future? What gives people these ideas in their head that it’s okay not to give someone rights or to fear them?

I believe that the media plays a massive role in the way people think of others. For example the way make-up targets women into making them feel ugly or not young enough. Another example is how they always put such negative stories about immigrants or minorities, causing others to fear them. The unfortunate reality is that people choose to listen to what the government/ media tells them what is wrong or right, but all the government is, are just people just like us. So who are they to tell us what is right or wrong? I believe the only solution to such poor judgment is for people to think for themselves and question everything.