As an African American woman, there are many pre-conceived notions and stereotypes that have been presented to me by society. For example, in high school, people assumed that I wouldn't have real hair, that I would be loud, and that I only listened to hip hop and RnB. I was also told that I wasn't normal because of the way I talked.
Their idea of a "normal" vernacular for an African American consisted of Ebonics and slang. As I thought about these things, in class, I discovered that people create borders in order to define what is and isn't normal. The "border" between being black and white deems that an African American speaking with proper grammar and an eloquent vocabulary isn't normal.
The border between living in a "good" neighborhood and living in "the hood" says that it's only normal for crime to happen in the bad neighborhoods. With so many borders and ideas of normality, comes those who are categorized as transgressors: people who don't form to society's views.
People like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Mariah Carey are all transgressors and have shown that society's idea of being normal is skewed and wrong. At present, I'm excited to dig deeper into defining borders, establishing what it means to be normal, and learning about transgressors.
It's nice how you internalized your own history into this blog and related it to how celebrities and other people have experienced borders that were created from other's perceptions of themselves.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy how you made this blog personal. Instead of just stating random facts, you brought your own life and others into it also.
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