Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Charles French June 22nd 'Being Different'

The first thing that I noticed when I was reading these two pieces was that I initially assumed that the piece about the 'Indian' would be about a woman from India and not of a Native American. Beyond that, in this first piece I noticed that it was more difficult for this girl to maintain her cultural identity. It almost seemed to me as though she tried to maintain her 'Indian-ness' but the influence from the 'paleface' was too great and so she ended up giving up her heritage in favor of gaining acceptance. The other thing about this piece that stuck out to me was how 'stereotypical' it seemed. The images of the Indian girl calling the white people 'paleface' seemed like a very stereotypical image.

As for the second piece about the Chinese woman, it seemed to me that she was much more resilient and better able to stand up for herself in claiming her proper heritage in the face of numerous societal pressures, for the better part of the piece anyway. It also seemed as though the white people in this piece were more readily accepting of her when she 'came out' to them about the fact that she was Chinese.

1 comment:

  1. I really got the same sense of resilience from the second story as well, I felt like she was able to stand up for herself more that the girl in the first story, who found being accepted as more valuable than her Indian heritage and the requests of her mother.

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