No Hablo Ingles

   So, this summer I acquired a job at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, working in the cafés that are situated there, and I think that that was the first real experience I had being a minority.
   For those who don't know, I am whiter than Conan O'Brian and, statistically, am in the"majority". Keep in mind, throughout this post, that the is merely a social construct. As my French teacher says, "Il y a une espèce: les humaines" (There is one species: human).
  Typically, especially in service and manual labor, the workers seem to be overwhelmingly immigrants. Why? Think of it this way: if America started have some really big issues that we're affecting everyone and lots of us began migration to say, Canada, we probably would take whatever jobs we could get as well.
   At the Botanic Gardens, the majority of people who landscape and work in the kitchen are Hispanic. I got to work in the back of the kitchen a couple weeks ago. I made jell-o and pudding cups and wrapped cookies. I love that kind of stuff, but I felt lonely. If I needed help, there was only one girl I could ask and she was pretty busy, and I could only ask her because everyone else were native Spanish speakers and I didn't want to assume that they automatically spoke perfect English.
   Also, nobody was talking to me. I didn't speak Spanish and everybody else was laughing and chatting around me and I felt alone. I wished I had taken Spanish in school but I also realized that I was getting a sense of how it feels to be a minority. There's just this feeling of loneliness that comes from being separated from society based on your culture or the color of your skin.
   I think that us in the "majority" often forget how it feels to be on the outside so noticeably. It's hard to imagine for us sometimes that racism exists because we never see it because, physically, we "fit in".

Shouldn't Make a Difference

I am a female, if you weren't aware, and I watch television (I know,shocking). But, what if I told you that more often than not,when you are watching my fellow ladies on TV, you are seeing the same woman over and over again?
  Below, I am going to show you three promotional posters for some of network TV's most watched shows:

NCIS

Look at the women in these posters. Notice how they look, physically first. Do you see how every single one of them is wearing neutral, fitted clothing? How they seem to be on the taller side? How all but one of them is Caucasian and has the same slim, curve-less, body type?
Don't get me, wrong, I'm not saying that having a character who looks like this is wrong, but having all your characters exactly the same seems very constricting to me.
America is a country made up of different body types and races and personalities and styles. I don;t think it's right that these are the only women network TV show because it helps perpetuate the idea that there is a "normal" way to look.
That idea is ridiculous. I know people who have had eating disorders, and I think that veery girl is insecure about herself in some way, partially due to the way we are portrayed in the media.
And i bet, that if you watched these shows, and were asked to give each girl a personality trait that differentiate shed form the others, you would be able to find little to nothing to say.

The New PIC

         First off, the acronym PIC stands for "Prison Industrial Complex". Just thought I'd get that out of the way. Secondly, many of you may be wondering "Why, what is the prison industrial complex?". Well my confused friend, the prison industrial complex, or PIC, is the idea that for economic reasons, state owners of prisons have been selling the majority of their prisons off to private companies. Those private companies have people invested in their stocks and those private companies need to make money. One of the ways to make money for them, would be to have a lot of people on prison, whilst cutting down on some of the "expenses". The result is that a lot more people are being incarcerated and given longer sentences for non-violent crimes, as well as the fact that the amount of prisoners in the U.S. has increased a lot.
I think that the show(on netflix, bear with me) "Orange is the New Black" does a really good job of illustrating how the American prison industrial complex works. I can jut surly using this show as a source because it was based off a memoir written by Piper Kerman about her experiences in a women's prison. She was given a 15 month sentence.

P

The reason why I think this show illustrates the PIC so well is that it shows how difficult the PIC makes it stay out of prison once you've been in. *SPOILER ALERT*One of the supporting characters called Taystee(stop laughing) finally gets her case re-evaluated and is out of prison. She is super excited and practically dances into the van that will drive her away. However, several ekes later, she shows up in prison again to the shock of her friends. She said that she purposely put herself back into prison because it was better then living on the outside world as a former convict. She was working a minimum wage job and had no place to stay and at least in prison she had a bed and regular meals. Even when I applied for my first job last year, there was a section on the résumé where I was forced to answer whether or not I'd been in prison.
The prison industrial complex makes is easy to stay in the cycle of incarceration, even for those who want to stay out of it. Another example: I was watching "30 Days", a show where Morgan Spurlock, director of "Super Size Me", went voluntarily to a men's prison to see heat it was like. There, he met a man who said that he finally wanted to get out of his gang and find a job. However, in the end credits,  it was stated that the man was in prison once again.