Journal #1 – Nike Ad

On September 5th, Nike released a video advertisement celebrating their 30th year anniversary. In the video, Colin Kaepernick, a former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, was the main highlight. He had been playing for them since 2012 but gain his international attention in 2016 for his protest, where he knelt down during the national anthem at his games. His protest was against police violence towards African Americans. His actions sparked anger among many people including football fans. The anger increased when Nike released its ad. Many people were posting videos of them burning Nike gears in response to the ad. One Twitter user by the name of Sean Clancy tweeted a video of him burning a pair of white Nike sneakers with the caption saying that the NFL made him choose between his favorite sport and his country, then Nike made him choose between his favorite shoes and his country; he chose his country for both. I don’t think that the NFL nor Nike was ever making anybody choose between them and our country. You should be able to support your favorite sport, shoes, and country. I know that there are many patriotic people out there that felt upset after his protest, but I believe that if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say it; keep it to yourself. To me, the message behind the ad is what matters. Also, people burning the Nike gears that they have already bought is foolish because they’ve already spent their money on it; they might as well burn their money. Nike sales surged 31% after the ad, so I think Nike is unbothered by this whole controversy, and so am I.

Journal #2 – The Resistance Inside The Trump Administration

Primarily, I was never a Trump supporter, to begin with. When he won the election, I was very appalled and disappointed. However, now, according to this article, some of his supporters in the Trump administration do not agree with some of his ways of presiding over our country.  The title, in particular, is very ironic in itself, and it is a statement that I had a feeling would be said one day after Donald Trump won. For the most part, I can relate and appreciate the honesty and risk that the anonymous writer must have taken when deciding to publish this article. I resonate most with the last four paragraphs of the article which brings our attention as a nation not on what Donald Trump has done to the presidency but what we have let him do to us. When I turn on the TV or go on social media, I always see people talking about everything wrong that Donald Trump is doing or saying, yet they sit there and do nothing, including myself. I know that not all of us feel like we can do something that’ll be effective, but there are people in his administration that don’t agree with everything that he is doing, yet they are not taking action. I am glad that this anonymous writer was able to voice the opinion of many people in the Trump Administration. If I were in the Trump administration, which is unlikely, I would use my position for good because although that may jeopardize my job, I am for the people, not the president.

Journal #3 – Can You Spot The Realest Fake News?

The internet is filled with fake information that misleads its audience. Many news outlets tend to use poor grammar or click-bait titles to lure their readers into reading and eventually believing their stories. Being biased towards a certain person or group of people is also one of the many attributes of fake news; CNN, among many news websites, is one of them. CNN has been known for being very biased towards Democrats. On November 6th, 2017, they published an article about Donald Trump overfeeding fishes in the Koi pond while on his trip to Japan. He was headed to lunch with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and decided to feed some fish at a pond. CNN stated in their article that Trump poured the entire box of fish food into the pond “with a look of enjoyment” on his face. The whole article was just very biased in general because it had some exaggerated diction such as “ dumped” to get its point across. The news was fake anyway because the article included a video that was edited by CNN to make it seem like Donald Trump dumped it first, when in reality, the prime minister dumped it first, and Donald Trump did it right after. Plus, they both were smiling to each other after they did it, and people who were there were laughing along with them. Although CNN’s white house producer, Kevin Liptak, contributed to the writing of the article, his credibility might be questioned because I would assume that he is supposed to report true information; however, since CNN is biased towards Democrats, I guess they considered it acceptable for them to publish this.

Journal #4 – Colorism

Most people think that racism and discrimination are the same. To me, racism is believing that a particular race is superior to another while making a race or other races feel inferior. Discrimination, however, is prejudicing a person or a group of people based on their race, gender, age, or sexual orientation and treating them differently. I believe that African American people, mostly women, are one of the groups of individuals that are discriminated against the most. I am a 17-year-old African American female, and while African Americans are discriminated against in America, the fact that I am not a US-born black female, made me experience discrimination even more. The irony is that I have experienced it from my own race as well, so I would like to say that I have experienced colorism more than racism. Colorism is discrimination on the shade of skin color regardless of what race you are. Although I am a black female, I am on the darker side of black. In my home country, Togo, dark skin is not seen as attractive, so bleaching your skin is very popular there. Ever since I was about five years old, I’ve always wanted to bleach my skin when I got older. When I moved to the US, that desire got even stronger because my exposure to people of light skin color got broader. I was bullied throughout Middle School by African Americans for not only being from Africa but also being darker than them. I would get inappropriate questions from both black and white people such as “ Does a lot of dirt come out when you shower?” or comments such as “ I bet you don’t have to shave your legs because I wouldn’t notice anyway.” At that time, I was still learning English, so I thought they were laughing with me instead of at me. When I started High School, I was already fluent in English, and I’ve learned to ignore them and appreciate the abundance of melanin in my skin. Now, the thought of bleaching my skin sounds so immoral to me that I can’t believe I even thought of doing it. Whether I am dark or not, I am just as black as the lightest black person and just as human as everyone else.

Journal #5 – The Voters Both Parties Are Ignoring

This podcast focuses on the group of voters that both the Democratic and the Republican party are not paying attention to; those group of voters is Latinos/Hispanics. There are about 60 million of them living in the United States today, and just about 30 million of them will be eligible to vote in the upcoming midterm elections this Tuesday, November 6th. This podcast features a national correspondent of the New York Times who is Mexican, Jose A. Del Real. He talked about an organization called Mi Familia Vota which engages Latinos, Hispanics, and immigrants in voting. When Jose A. Del Real gave details and comparisons between the 2012 elections and the 2016 election, I found it very unexpected. In the 2012 election with the candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Obama won 71% of the Hispanics vote, while Romney only won 20% of their votes because Obama was much more engaged with the Hispanics than any other president in US’ presidential history.  However in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump won 30% of their votes, which although it’s lower than Obama’s, it is higher than Mitt Romney’s. I find it very ironic because he is the most anti-immigration president ever. Also, in the 2016 elections, out of the 30 million Hispanics that were allowed to vote, 14.3 million of them did not, which leaves only about 15.7 million of them who did. Therefore, I want to focus more on why Latinos and Hispanics don’t vote. Del Real interviewed some Hispanics in Las Vegas on why they don’t vote, and a lady by the name of Sandra Alvaro said that she had voted every year, but she has noticed that nothing changes. She feels that none of the candidates pivot on the issues that some Hispanics care about such as mental health, children’s education, and monthly salary, so she categorizes herself as a non-partisan. In my opinion, the candidates pretend during their campaigns that they’re going to make things better for them but when they get elected, they forget about them. I also think that since the Latinos make up about 13 % of the electoral votes, the candidates feel the need to exploit them, so they’ll vote for them. At the end of the podcast, Del Real posed a question that was: Are the Hispanics not showing up because nobody’s reaching out to them or are people not reaching out to them because they are not showing up? To that question, I believe that they are not showing up because nobody’s reaching out to them because they must have had previous experiences that prompted them not to vote. I think that this podcast was an eye-opener for many people and me because I never even knew that the Latinos were not voting or why. Lastly, I believe that to get them to vote, the candidates have to start engaging with them more like Obama did and include more of the beliefs and issues that they care about.  

Journal #6 – A Shooting At The Tree Of Life Synagogue

This podcast is about the tragic event that happened in Pittsburgh. In the podcast, a writer about technology for The New York Times, Kevin Roose talked about a Jewish American nonprofit organization called HIAS that supplies aid to the Jewish refugees and how this organization is connected to the shooter. According to Roose, the shooter, who was found to be Robert Bowers, uses the social media website called “Gab” where he is very open about how he does not like the idea of Jewish refugees crossing our border and how HIAS is the main organization encouraging it. On Saturday,  October 27th, he posted his final message to “Gab” that states that he could not take it anymore and that he was going in. He went to the synagogue with four guns and shouted that he wanted all Jews to die, then proceeded to start shooting. In this journal, I want to focus on the 1st amendment and how social media plays a big part in it. According to the podcast, most of the users of “Gab” are people such as Richard Spencer, that have been kicked out of previous popular online sites such as Twitter and Facebook for being way too extreme on their views and opinions. The reason is that “Gab” allows you to post and talk about whatever you want whether it is controversial or not. It also does not forbid hateful comments and sensitive speech which is why it has become a great platform for people like Robert Bowers to voice their opinions. “Gab” was made by a conservative programmer in Silicon Valley as a way of retaliating against its ban on hate speech. I think that social media plays a vital part in the manipulation of the 1st amendment. I believe that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but at the same time, if it’s hurting people, I think there ought to be some limits. Most of the shootings that have happened in 2018 so far has been hinted by the shooters on a social media platform. I think that society has used social media in a way that has become toxic. Some people such as Robert Bowers use their platform to voice very anti-semitic and racist opinions. I also think that this podcast did an excellent job at centering their topic around the root of the tragedy rather than just reporting what happened. When I first heard about this shooting on TV, it was just news outlets stating facts such as casualties and at what time the event happened. I think that if we deep clean our platform on social media to promote positive things instead of exploiting the 1st amendment for negative attention, less of these tragic events would happen. I am not stating that doing this would stop people from killing forever; however I think that’ll give them less attention, so they’ll most likely not do it.

Journal #7 – Why Trump Is Firing Sessions Now? 

This podcast is about Donald Trump firing Jeff Sessions, a national politician and senator in Alabama, at a time that he thought was convenient, the midterm election. Ever since 2016, Jeff Sessions played an important factor in the campaign for the Trump administration. The issue on immigration has always been very important to Jeff Sessions, and that was what sparked him endorsing Trump in his presidential campaign. They both bonded over their standing on the Immigration policy, which was one of the main policies that Trump promised to take care of when he gets elected. Since the Senate did not always accept most of the statements that Sessions has made in the past on the Immigration policy, Trump making that a tenant on what he is running on, made Sessions immediately become close with him. I think this podcast is a representation of how trust can easily be broken in a professional and working relationship. I think that Trump was using Sessions’ support for his benefit, not the public’s. Sessions also benefited from his relationship with Trump because he gained a lot of attention from the public and he quickly became Trump’s attorney general. Sessions decided to resign because of his involvement with the Russian investigation. The main argument presented in this podcast was the reason why Trump fired Sessions, a few hours after the Midterm election and that reason are that he thinks that he is in the 2nd year of his presidency, so he is allowed to change and replace the people that work for him. I think that if Trump has the right to do this because as he said in the podcast, “I would have never made Jeff Sessions my attorney general if I knew he was going to recuse himself.” Firing Sessions will also benefit Trump in the Russian investigation because his new attorney would not have to recuse themselves and that would bring more authority to him. I have heard in the past about the Russian investigation, but I have never heard of Jeff Sessions or his relationship with Donald Trump. The most interesting part of this podcast is when they were discussing the timeline of how Trump and Sessions built their bond. However, the most troubling part was how they had to separate because of an investigation that is controlling Trump’s presidency. However, I strongly agree with Trump’s decision to fire Sessions because that’ll give him more power in the Russian investigation. Overall, this podcast was extremely helpful to me because this is something that I’ve never known about, so it kept me updated with the issues surrounding our politics nowadays.

Journal # 8 – SYSK Does The Five-second Rule Work?

This podcast was about a strategy or rule that almost everyone tends to go by which is called the five-second rule. In the podcast, speakers by the name of Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant were discussing what they thought about, how and whether they apply it to their lives or not. Whether you go by it or not, no one likes germs or bacteria in their foods. While I was looking at the title of this podcast, I started to do some thinking before listening. I certainly don’t count the seconds when I drop food, but as they said in the podcast, it depends what the food is and where it lands when it drops. Josh Clark talked about the hygiene hypothesis which is states that humans, especially children need to be exposed to bacteria for their bodies to learn how to fight it so that they will be immune to it. I agree with the statement that the comedian they mentioned, Noah Gardenswartz, stated which was that the five-second rule exists on a sliding scale meaning, as I stated before, that it depends what the food is and where it lands; he also talked about how certain dry foods such as Cheetos and cookies can be eaten whenever they’re found, which I totally agree with because I have done it numerous times. Most people, including me, use the five-second rule because they think that it takes five seconds for bacteria to start jumping on the food; however, a high school student in 2003 by the name of Julian Clark conducted an investigation on this matter. She coated towels with E.coli and dropped cookies and gummy bears on to it.  After five seconds, there were lots of bacteria that jumped on them; also, the longer the cookies and gummy bears stayed there, the more bacteria they picked up. I could relate with the part of the podcast about how in Japanese traditions, you have to take your shoes off before you step foot in the house because, in my African tradition, we have to do the same thing for the same reason that Japanese people do it. The germs from this filthy world can put a restraint on the five-second rule because with all the time that we spend outside; we are picking up almost every bacteria under our feet. Lastly, to answer the podcast’s title question, I think that the five-second rule is not a consistent rule to follow because there is a difference between dropping a chocolate chip cookie on the floor of your apartment and dropping the same chocolate chip cookie in your high school classroom.

Journal #9 – Memoir Reflection

The title of my memoir was “ Why Do I Worry So Much,” and it was about starting a new part of my life and moving from my home country in Africa to the United States. I described how I felt and dealt with the nostalgia and worry that came with it and how I adapted to this extreme change. In the past, I have never written a memoir before, so it was a bit challenging. I struggled more with the format of writing a memoir than choosing a topic to write about. It was difficult for me not to make it sound like a summary of an event in my life; rather a memoir is not just a personal event, but also what you have learned about the event. In the first few chapters that we read, the five elements of a rhetorical situation, which are text, author, audience, purpose, and setting were great guidelines in helping me figure out what elements are crucial to put in a memoir in general. After writing the memoir, I was very confident in the imagery that I have and my peers who have reviewed my writing would also agree as I have gotten great feedbacks from them. My main struggle, however, was which tense would be more useful for my memoir, which i why I used both past and present because I was confused. Now, I know to just pick one that sounds best according to what I am writing about in order to have a clear legible flow. Overall, most of my issues were grammatical such as using dashes incorrectly between two sentences. Writing a memoir is difficult if it is your first time, but I think it was convenient and beneficial to have it as my first writing assignment to apply what I have learned in my future writings.

Journal #10 – Best And Worst 

In High School, I never really enjoyed English class. I was more an a math and science type of person. History was and still is my least favorite class and since it required a great deal of reading, English became a close second. I use to struggle with writing essays especially when I was introduced to the MLA format. With that mindset and going into college, I expect it to get worse. I presumed lots of difficult essays and assignments with little to no help because I have been thought that college is basically professors giving numerous amounts of complicated work to stress out the students. Surprisingly, now that we are at the end of the semester, I am stunned to say that English was actually my favorite and least stressful class. Although I have written more essays in these past 4 months than I have written in a whole year in high school, the difference was the amount of interest I had in the topic of my assignments and the amount of effort I have exuded in my writings. My favorite assignment was the Food Review because not only did it not have a strict format, but it was the shortest, and I enjoyed eating for a grade; Also, it was our most unique assignment. The journals were also a quick, intelligent, and easy way to meet the minimum word count requirement. The hardest assignment in this semester was the rhetorical analysis on the documentary 13TH because of how factual it is. It was probably the only writing that I have done in this class that required citations and not citing anything could downgrade your paper. Overall, I appreciated how this class was not a lecture, and my peers and I were able to voice our opinions and suggestions on all of the tasks that we have done. It also prepared me for even harder writings in the near future of my college career.