In-class blog: Untouchable

In the novel Untouchable, we see a world that is based on a racial and cultural ideology. Over the course of the novel, Bakha struggles between family values and their religious believes and his wishes to be and Englishman. The only issue is that the cast division they are living in does not satisfies Bakha and feels anger towards the life that has been given to him. The main character Bakha, experiences several obstacles throughout the novel which affect him morally. On page 46 a Hindu merchant bumped into him and started insulting and describing him as an untouchable. Anand writes “Bakha stood still, with his hands joined, though he dared to lift his forehead, perspiring and knotted with his hopeless and futile expression of meekness” (Anand 46). In this scene Bakha has a realization of the significance of his place as an “untouchable” in the social hierarchy of the 1930’s in India. Although there are no obvious racial or ethnic differences between different classes of Hindus, they live in paradigm of a strict caste system based on religion and labor.    

Cluster Connections

These cluster has made the classes more easy going since basically the main argument is race and culture but from different points of view. It is interesting since most of the times some classes that seem difficult for me to understand if it was the only one it actually makes it easier because different arguments can be applied from class to another. In my first year college there were classes who talked a bit of what race is, but never truly how it affected so many aspects over the years. In Untouchables we can see the difference there is between the English upper class and the “untouchables” who are the lower class. Reading the book I made a connection with a video we saw in our anthropology class where this third grade teacher does a study to her students about discrimination. She divides the class based on eye color. One day the blue eyed children are in the top and the browned eyed in the bottom. In a matter of less than 10 minutes they already have discriminating verbal forms for the browned eyed kids, and a class that were friends at the beginning, all the sudden they divided and started hating each other just because they were classified as different. The teacher gave her students a group test and the “oppressor” or the group how was on the top, had better scores than the ones who were on the bottom. The same routine was made the next day but the brown eyed students were in the top this time. The thing that impressed me the most was that when the group was on top they had better scores regardless of how they did the day before with the exact same test. It also got my thinking about Slave and Citizen by Tannenbaum where he argues about how African Americans were treated as slaves and about how your skin color determined if you were a slave or not. This video made me click plus Slave and Citizen got me think over and over again that what if there would NEVER been a race classification and we weren’t jugged oppressed, or misunderstood? What if we were all classified as a human being and not a race or color?

Are California Prisons Punishing Inmates Based on Race? - Response

On twitter in Prison Watch Network (@Prisonwatchint) I stumbled upon an interesting tweet talking about how cells in California have a color coded based on race.  They have “colored signs” that hang on each cell door.  These signs are used to indicate each race, whether it’s black, white, Hispanic or other.  This system is used to penalize inmates of the same race when one of them assaults a guard.  California is the only state that we know of that uses race-based prisons.  The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says that this is the only way to control gang members because they unite depending on skin color. Instead of controlling the entire race, they should punish the gang members who started the assault. What impressed me the most was the color coded prison doors and classification of races. I couldn’t believe how racism still persists in such a way. Tweeter is a good gate way of information and social media. I am actually impressed, because one of the reason I do not have many social medias is because there was nothing interesting to look at or read.

Anti-Islamic Hate Crimes Incidents

 The Anti-Islamic Hate Crime Incidents chart represent that throughout 1995 to 2000 there were a fewer haters. In 2001 there was an airplane attack on the World Trade Center that destroyed them completely. In the chart it strongly indicates that in the year of that attack there was a massive increase. The terrorist who destroyed them where Islamic, therefor there was a big crowd of people who unapproved Islam. After five years later the percentage was still high and the chart clearly demonstrate how that impact damaged the United States’ society way of thinking towards the Islam community. It quadrupled or even more the number of Anti-Islamic Crime incidents after 9-11 in the 2001. In the 2007 it started decreasing up to the 2008. When 9-11 occurred, many controversies roused indicating it was not a terrorist attack and that is was the US government. Ten years later and I still do not know what to believe.  But still the impact it cause to society changed many things for example how people relate to Muslims or Islam because they have a turban or how TSA in the airports changed drastically. The attacks were because of anger or fear.