First thing I want to talk about is I Spent 5 Years with Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. This article really got me out of my bubble, let me explain. For the longest time I’ve believed in an idea that people we live in bubbles. Within these bubbles’ reality exists that makes sense of the people who live in it. most bubbles you choose to live in but there are some which contain other bubbles like Venn diagrams. To this end all humans live in the bubble of humanity, or the basest line personification of human thought an experience. Therefore, it’s impossible to not live in a bubble and I’m no person who doesn’t. So, when it comes to myself, I find that I go into a very left of center political bubble or the bubble that consists people who think there left of center but are just a bunch of socialists who can’t commit to anything. So, hearing about these people’s political beliefs and their justification to why they believe in what they believe in Made me must take a real look at what I believed in politically and how they interpreted their surroundings and how at times I could relate to their feelings of shame in taking help. Knowing you need help and two-way subconscious degree are weak can can eat you up inside. A paradoxically makes you not like getting help even though you need it. Also just like in that article the different sources of where you get help from matter in the shame you feel by taking it. “A devoted Christian, Sharon’s mother believed in a generous church. But government benefits were a very different story. Taking them meant you’d fallen and weren’t proudly trying to rise back up.” Arlie Russell Hochshild. I vividly remember getting help from the teacher was fine but getting help from the assistant teacher who worked in the resource room it was bad. Because it would highlight how so you’re in the room that gets a very broad spectrum of children who have learning disabilities together. Do you know if I was born somewhere else would I still get the help that I needed to succeed? If I were born somewhere else would I have succeeded as much as I have so far? a similar sentiment is echoed by one of the people in the whiteness project I believe his name is Cameron. He says “R.D: “Again, I must call into question just how much of that is really coming from hard work and the grit. How much of it is because of the color of my skin, how much of that is handed to me?”. Then when you get down to it you really can only think about this you never will truly you there is no sign that you accomplished anything on your own. I think to a point that idea can get a bit ridiculous at times, but he does have major questions within it. For example, mostly your childhood is your parents doing and there’s no real shame in getting help from them as you grow but at a certain point it is expected of you to separate. And schools it environment where there supposed to get the first taste of your own hard work producing fruit but even then it’s not your own hard work it’s the work of your teachers who are teaching. So how much is really your effort of course you at the point effort into school in order to be successful but Are the ratios figured then we’d like them to be?
Hi Doyle, I’m fascinated by this powerful reflection on the experiences of the people Hochschild interviewed and how your own experiences helped you empathize with them. I also like how, near the end, you turned some of the ideas you’d been building to the Whiteness Project.
As you continue to work on this project, I’d like to see you consider how race functions in the deep story of disempowerment that Hochschild uncovered, and how and why that disempowerment gets racialized.
I’d also encourage you to think about solutions to racism beyond the theory you keep advancing but have little faith in (the human tribe) by considering what Yoshino and Olson have to say about what might diminish racism, and thinking about the idea in the “Invention of Race” that racism is a system for maintaining white power and privilege. If that’s the case, one way to end racism is….