Eleanor Heaton Conversation 4 – Group X

(Pag. 40 Par. 2-3) African children and adolescents are often presented with false characterizations and propaganda in the wider global media claiming falsehoods about Africa, such as that it is an entirely diseased, impoverished, or void of long-term sustainability for life. In a truly multicultural education system would require that African children and adolescents are provided with the oral and published tools and ideas to dispute such misinformation.

            I agree with this statement wholeheartedly and having done research before on African countries for another course, it’s extremely strange that Africa is portrayed so libelously by the world’s mass media when it was so easy for me to find out even just local town politics of a given African country from the front-page results of Google. There becomes a point in which an idea becomes so increasingly ridiculous that one must actively defend themselves against it, and this is clearly one of those times.

I think the biggest thing I can relate to is the identity reductionism that ultimately takes place in the United States no matter what one may try to do. Ultimately, in the eyes of almost all others, I will always be firstly a transgender woman, then anything else that I truly am. Of course, the largest difference is that sometimes people can’t tell that I am transgender, but unfortunately that is rare and more than anything when I start speaking I see people’s expressions change and often the largest thing I get is confusion to whether I’m committing fraud when they see my name compared to my voice.

            I think this academic article, “African Students in the USA: How an Unnoticed Group Beats the Odds,” written by Kenneth Butcher, a community college professor in Kentucky, brings out an interesting idea–why is that African immigrant students consistently outperform every other ethnic group in the developed world. I selected it because it really brings out a detail that I can immediately tell at a school like BMCC where a lot of African immigrants’ study, which is that they generally outperform other students. Until finding this article, I simply thought it was something everybody noticed, however realized it’s the exact opposite. It matters so much, especially to students at this specific school, because when one is living and breathing an idea it’s so important to understand why one is doing so and to find that one isn’t crazy (or that one’s preconceived notions may have been wrong).