Dear Freshmen,

Dear Incoming Freshman,

I would like to preface this letter with a lively, belligerent Orange “Welcome!” on behalf of the Syracuse University student body. Congratulations on your acceptance and enrollment to the best college ever. Over these four or five years you spend as an undergraduate student, you will take many classes which you find lightyears more interesting than your high school ones and others where neither you nor the professor know anyone’s names. And that’s ok. And likely of the biggest, most pivotal skills you will acquire in your freshman year is the ability to actually read and write.

Hold on. I know. She said it. Reading and writing. I know, I know. But not the way you did it in high school. The real way. In the real world, you read for content, not completion. In college, you read a ton of essays and texts and they all sound the same and you eventually learn how to pull out the valuable information. Did you ever notice that when you highlighted your textbooks to study you still couldn’t figure out what was important? Freshman year fine tunes those skills.

I am an Industrial Design student within the school of Visual and Performing arts, and because of that I only take two academic courses this semester: Writing 105, and Russian 101. In Russian, the only reading or writing is strictly factual and informative with nothing to deduce or infer. I entered Writing 105 with the notion that my academic writing was fine at the level where it was. The very ‘high school’ approach of “summarization” in academic writing actually requires no skill at all. The real challenge in academic writing is analysis, which begs the question, how can you tell the difference when you’re the writer?

The only writing I do outside of Writing 105 in design school is in Modern Art History where I am asked to write one page single-spaced personal responses to eras, movements, and styles.These are very easy to receive Check-Pluses on, considering that all you have to do is write down how you feel. One particular assignment was to watch a dreadful hour long video about the First World Fair in England, and then respond in the normal fashion. I decided to skip out on the video and just do some internet research and summarize what I had learned. Needless to say, I received a Check-Minus. I was only able to absorb dates and names and facts and regurgitate them. Through constant readings and responses in Writing 105, I managed to hone in on the skill it took to absorb text. By the Unit 2 assignment, I was able to watch a 90 minute documentary and use it as a major source in my paper.

One of the hardest concepts for me to grasp about academic writing was found in the document “Seems to Be About X…”. This briefly presented the idea that what you see is not necessarily what you get. It implores you to read in between the lines and use skills of inference. By taking a single statement, and asking yourself the implications of that statement, you are able to see what the real message is.

The skills I gained in Writing 105 have helped me enormously with my reading skills. I personally do not yet have much reading to complete in my college classes outside of this one, but I find that my deductive and identification skills have taught me how to be a better reader outside of class. For next semester, I will be beginning my track for my minor in Russian Literature, as I take my primary classical literature course. It will be a reading intensive class and I know that having these skills will make the half dozen books we read go by much quicker. 
All semester, in my Modern Art History class, we have been discussing manifestos in great detail and depth. When I was assigned to read another one in Writing 105, I literally recoiled. We read an updated, reinvented version of “The Labor Day Manifesto”. It concisely told the reader how to be more productive and content with yourself and your life by following eleven steps. It is hard to take an instruction guide, so to speak, seriously as an example of academic writing but it is. Think about it. Academic writing is just grammatically formal, analytical, evidence based writing from a perspective in an academic environment.
All in all, academic writing is tricky. It’s one of those things that right now, you think you are adequately skilled in and you will continue to think so throughout the first semester. It will only be when you look back on your assignments from the very first weeks that you realize the incredible improvement you’ve made as a reader and writer. I look back on my first analyses from Writing 105 and can honestly say I smirked at how unknowingly lazily I wrote them.

Reflection

I struggled with this assignment. I’m just gonna put that out there into the open, as if you could not already tell. My writing is supposed to be improving dramatically, and I feel it has, up until this unit assignment. I felt as though as a design student in VPA, my perspective as a student here was skewed and invalidated as a writer about academia. I feel that because I do not complete any academic writings in college outside of my Writing class, I did not have much to talk about. Because of my lack of evidence, I found myself using filler and sort of BS’ing the essay. I know this essay is one of my poorer ones, but I genuinely don’t know what to do.

I read the literacy assignments in class, but I still don’t understand how they are supposed to apply to my personal situation. The “Literacy Games” article, for example. I really enjoyed this piece, but because I have no concrete academic classes, all of my teachers use “alternative” or “fun” learning methods, simply because they are studios. My major itself is very new age and fun and receives respect in spurts throughout society.

I felt like this unit was rushed. Maybe I feel that way because I was sick and missed some class, or maybe because we had the Thanksgiving break deadline pushing things; I don’t know, but I felt like we spent way less time on this section than the other two. I think additionally, this unit happened to be the hardest because it was the least concrete as a theme.

Overall, I’m very disappointed in my final product for this unit three assignment. I think I could have done a lot better and that irks me, but I struggle because I genuinely do not know how else I should have approached this. Maybe I went about my thinking the wrong way. I’m not sure. I just know I could have done much better.

Shades and Colors: Growing up Biracial

In much of the twentieth century, the black community heavily utilized the “science” and “methodology” of what is known as “the paper bag test” to determine one’s overall value in society. The test was simple: if a woman’s skin is lighter than a paper bag, she is beautiful, intelligent, feminine, kind, ideal, and if a woman’s skin is darker than a paper bag, she is unattractive, unintelligent, mean, and useless. This is where my story begins.

In looking back on my childhood and early adult years, I realize the impact race had on my life was less grounded on racism, and more on colorism. Colorism is prejudice or discrimination based on the relative lightness or darkness of the skin, generally a phenomenon occurring within ones own ethnic group. I am black and white, but untraditionally so. The ‘black’ side of me comes from Barbados and England with Cherokee Native American, and the ‘white’ side of me is nearly entirely Slavic, coming from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. In middle school, I personally constituted twenty five percent of my grade’s ‘colored’ population, and I am only half black. I was confronted by race in a way I had never before experienced. I stood out because of how I looked and it made the next three years some of the most miserable of my life. For those years, I was alienated because I was “the black girl”, but in eighth grade, something changed; I became “the mixed girl”.

As if my being black and a non practicing Catholic wasn’t enough, the students and faculty at my school didn’t even accept the ‘White’ side of me. I was half Eastern European, which is a very heavily Jewish region of Europe, even though neither my ancestors, nor I were so. In eighth grade, when prompted to present about our primary region of origin in the world, I chose Poland (since that is the largest percentile representation I have in any country). At the end of my presentation, my teacher, Mrs. Reischer, asked me inquisitively, “But you are mulatto, right?”

For everyone who thinks my teacher just accused me of being a Starbucks drink, let me clarify: “Mulatto” is the slave term for a biracial person, likely born to a slave and a slavemaster, and it equates to “nigger”. I was not offended at all, just confused. I corrected her and went on with my day, still sufficiently confused. What year was it? Was ‘mulatto’ still a noun comfortably situated in the vocabularies of our seniors – the wiser of society? Evidently so. I went home and told my black mother what had happened and she smirked. She was equally confused, but utterly amused at the ignorance of society. We never spoke about it in depth.

Race was not an element of my home. My parents were black and white, and divorced. My mother remarried a black man with a quarter French in his background. My step-brother was adopted from Guyana, and is much darker than the rest of us. My little sister took after my step-dad with narrower features and a lighter complexion, making her mistakably Korean. We all looked nothing alike, but still we were everything alike. We understood that we didn’t look the same, but why did it matter?

My parents did their absolute best raising me, to help me define myself as a person, regardless of race. However, due to this, when I entered a world where people are uncomfortable because of one’s inability to fit into one racial bubble on a standardized test, I drowned. Too abstract? Humor me. After the comment in school, I was faced with the paradox that I was different from other people; no one I knew looked like me, and likely, no one ever would. And because of this, I had to establish my place in society and take it for what it was: a shit-show. For much of my life, White people I knew found me threatening. I am almost White, but with undeniable Black qualities. It was kind of like how television aliens are so close to being humans, but once you make them purple and naked with bug eyes, people just can’t get comfortable with it. Then you have the Black perception of me, and this is where it gets complicated.

From my own personal experiences, I have found that younger Black men find biracial women, myself inclusive, more attractive than fully black women. There is a societal element of colorism that makes Black men often likely to pursue lighter skinned or biracial women because of their fairness and closer resemblance to White women. I have also found that, at the risk of sounding like a completely narcissistic bitch, Black girls react in a polar manner toward biracial girls as well. Darker skinned black girls have often disliked me, and made it apparent. I’ve been verbally attacked for ‘thinking [I was] better than [them]’ because I am light, and part White. I feel like society today has beaten the dead horse of Black-White relations to a pulp, but in recent years, people are becoming wholly more aware of the larger elephant in the room – intra-Black relations and stigma.

In the novel “On Beauty” written by author Zadie Smith, she explores the dynamic of a biracial family. My favorite quote from that book (while it is a long one) comes during the fight following the realization that Howie, the unlikeable protagonist, has been cheating on his wife, Kiki Belsey. It lends itself to the black woman’s perception of her role in society because of race, and her white husband’s preferences.

A little white woman, . . . [a] tiny little white woman I could fit in my pocket.’ . . . ‘And I don’t know why I’m surprised. You don’t even notice it – you never notice. You think it’s normal. Everywhere we go, I’m alone in this… this sea of white. I barely know any black folk any more, Howie. My whole life is white. I don’t see any black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking café in your fucking college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through a corridor . . .

In truth, Howie loved his wife’s regal Black features and her curves, and his preferences in his infidelity were not conscious of race or superiority. The novel goes to great lengths to show that, in fact, Howie was just an asshole. Much of the stigma Kiki felt she faced was in her head because she spent so much time being the only Black woman around her husband’s circle of academics.

In my research for this post, I found a documentary titled “Dark Girls” directed by B. Channsin Berry and Bill Duke. It explored colorism primarily among Black women, but also among Koreans and Latin Americans. One woman recalls back to middle school when she and her friends would fight lighter skinned girls in the bathroom “just because”. She is able to look back regretfully and realize that she acted out of jealousy and resentment. The scrutiny she faced from society filled her with anger that she wrongfully channeled at the these girls. She explained that the fairer girls received all the attention from the boys as being pretty and smart, with beautiful skin and hair, and it made them jealous; shamefully, she admits that some friends of hers even threw balls of nair at them to make their hair fall out. The tension between light skinned and dark skinned girls is a very real and tangible one.

Even as a young adult, I am faced with the same level of colorist tension that I received as a kid. As recently as this past weekend, I found that when I spend time with my Black friends, certain mannerisms of mine change and become ‘blacker’. If I fail to make these changes, I am clearly marked as an outsider. Because of this, I tend to keep a very diverse group of friends with whom I feel I can be myself. For example, I am Black and White biracial, with a South Indian boyfriend, and presently due to a health condition I will be unable to give birth, so we plan on adopting kids from Ethiopia, Morocco, and India. I am fluent in French and currently studying Russian. I am not a stereotype, and I implore anyone reading this to find one in which I fit. My friends look and act nothing like me; we come from different backgrounds and have different stories. So this lends itself to the question, where do biracial kids fit?

I challenge you, have you ever seen two biracial kids as friends? Possibly, but here – I challenge you even further, have you ever seen two biracial people in a relationship? Nope, never. You absolutely never have and likely never will. And do you know why? Because for some reason, mixed kids rarely find each other. Biracial people, we can spot another biracial person a mile away, and we can usually identify their mix and the ratio of each race. I have one friend that jokes that if she hears a voice ask, “Are you mixed?” she knows it’s me. And it’s true! Never before in my life have I known biracial kids, so here, in a school of 20,000, I realize that we are a real tangible population.

One of the most confusing aspects of the biracial population is that we are so dispersed in society. As I stated before, we are rarely ever together; it’s an anomaly if we are. Because of this, it allows for the question of whether we actually are a community. Personally, I believe so. We have mannerisms and language specific to us, that other people don’t quite understand. It’s commonalities like these that bring us together on the few occasions we actually cross paths. I cannot tell you how many times in a day, people ask me either “Can I touch your hair?” or “So what does your hair look like when it’s not straight?” Let me tell you, if I had a dollar for every time… But that’s the truth of it! People genuinely don’t know.

American society unintentionally lumps biracial kids into the same pile as twins, people from the UK, Italians, and sassy toddlers. We’re bombarded with a series of questions and requests to satisfy their curiosity about the alien nature of our being. And a lot of the time, not to sound like a sob story, it’s really hard! It’s frustrating when your mom doesn’t understand why you need to buy conditioner for your hair so often, and when your boyfriend asks why he never sees you shampoo your hair, or why you like tanning even though you’re half black, or why you jumped for joy when you realized College Board let you check multiple ethnicities. It’s the biracial specific isms that bring us together.

When I met my first biracial student at Syracuse, it was at a small hang-out at my friend’s apartment. He was very fair with freckles, and when I saw him I asked, “Are you mixed,” to which he replied yes.

His friend then asked if I was. He answered for me and said, “Yeah, she’s Black and White, too.”

That same friend asked how he knew, and we both replied simultaneously, “It’s a mixed kid thing.”

And it is. A conversation then budded about which parent was Black and how being mixed affected our childhoods and the kind of friendships we held and the experiences we each had. The real bonding moment was when we talked about how annoying it is when people always ask why we’re so light – why we don’t look like what a mixed kid should look like.

“TIME” magazine published an issue focused on “the new face of America” and mixed race people. I found the cover of the issue is particularly interesting because it is of a computer generated woman’s face, composed of different races. While you can clearly distinguish what ethnicities and races were likely used, you are unable to put your finger on exactly which feature comes from which race. This creates a feeling of uneasiness, but the heterosis allows the viewer to feel comfortable with the ambiguity of her features. Biracial kids will only become more mixed race as time progresses and it will be in that time that we reach a level of ambiguity in populations that allows us to comfortably exist.

Smith, Zadie. On Beauty: A Novel. New York: Penguin, 2005. Print.

http://officialdarkgirlsmovie.com/about/

http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19931118,00.html

Where Are We Now?

So around early fall of my senior year of high school, while I was legally permitted to drive and nearing my road test, my mother told me to take her car to go pick up my sister from school. Once I had my sister in tow, I told her that mom was not feeling well and that tonight was a takeout night; I asked what she wanted. She replied, McDonalds, and I said, no. “I’ll filibuster,” she said. Filibuster? What ten year old says filibuster, much less knows what it means? Evidently my sister.

My sister attends a local law primary school, much unlike the run-of-the-mill public school I attended at her age. She has daily computer program assignments in addition to literary and historical readings. In her Legal Studies class, every week or so, the students would watch a video depicting some of the events and laws which they learned. Because of all these mediums of literacy, I find my sister to be much more articulate and well read than myself at her age.  Her experience with literacy is much like Brittney Moraski’s (Devoss). She learned through the computer and it allowed her to absorb adult information and skills at a much faster rate than she would have received through books alone.Technological advancements in literacy such as the internet and media are the key in the upper hand today’s youth has over people my age and older. While almost everyone had a television, we only had about sixty or so channels available to us. Today, my sister has about one thousand channels. It’s advancements like this that expose youth to history and news much more quickly and effectively than in years prior. The change from basic cable to scanning cable tv just shows the rapid progression literacy and technology undergoes regularly, as explained in the article “From Pencils to Pixels”, by David Baron.

Easily, my biggest qualm with all of these literary advancements is the downplay of vocabulary. For as many historical facts and laws my sister knows, that I only recently learned, I can confidently say that my vocabulary blew hers right out of the water. There were not very many resources out there that were directed at children, so the literacy we did receive was generally aimed at people much older than us. It is because of that, I was able to hold my own in adult conversations and understand much more that I heard. I genuinely believe that the neglect of children’s non-fiction literacy is what gave my age group such strong inference skills. We actively used our skills to identify derivatives and suffixes to decipher words and phrases that we did not know. (While it may be a stretch, I think this idea will show itself when the number of Latin language students drops significantly as my sister’s peers enter high school and college.) More to the point, however, there is a serious difference between the age groups. My peers tend to be more verbose (for better or for worse), while her peers tend to be more concise.

It comforts me greatly to know that students are still forced to write everything in pencil until middle school when they are first allowed to grace the sheets of their agenda books with pens. It’s just nice to know some things do not change. Like school lunch for instance, they have always been horrible and goopy and served by a (wo?)man who appears to be an escaped felon with arm hair so thick it requires a net. Despite all the reforms in health and the crusade against trans fat-come child obesity, lunches remained gross; and in a world of change, lunch ladies remained even grosser. However, it horrifies me to know that schools are slowly eradicating cursive handwriting as a part of the curriculum. Cursive handwriting was my first tangible memory of literacy. The skills I learned in that second grade language arts class helped me to go on and forge my parents signatures in my agenda book so consistently throughout elementary school that to this day my signature reads my mother’s name. Cursive is slowly going to fizzle out and wind up on the shelf of our existence next to shorthand, as nothing more than a special skill on a resume for an entry level job.

I remember in language arts around fourth grade, my teacher would assign us a series of homeworks to do regarding a list of twenty or so vocabulary words. One of those assignments each week was to write each word four consecutive times. The whole point was to reiterate the spelling of the words by using properties of repetition and memory and so on. One day while turning in the assignment, my friend, Vani, handed my teacher a typed sheet with the words written four times. Later that day, Vani told us she did it because she realized she can just copy and paste all of the words. Brilliant! Quickly, we all began typing up our words. After a month or two of typing, selecting, copying, pasting and repeating, I grew tired of the system. It occurred to me that I was wasting precious time. From then on, I typed each word individually. Surely enough, I gained speed and accuracy in typing which gave me plenty more time to focus on the style of 3D rainbow word art I used to header each assignment.

All and all, what I am trying to get at is that things have changed a lot in the past ten years. Skill sets I have from my experiences are denied to my sister’s age group and replaced with skills that my peers and I do not possess. Everything comes with a catch. Literacy as I knew it at age ten is completely different than it is now. Kids today have access to media like online news, or resource apps on their phones and tablets. Youth are entering adulthood with a plethora of skills that generations prior do not have, and that puts them at the forefront of society with an unprecedented edge in competition.

Works Cited

DeVoss, Danielle, Gail E. Hawisher, Charles Jackson, Joseph Johansen, Brittney Moraski, and Cynthia L. Selfe. “The Future of Literacy.” Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States. Ed. Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. 183-210. Print

Baron, Dennis. “From pencils to pixels: The stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions, pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 15-33. Print