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ENG 302, Creative Writing, is a borderline boring course. The professor is very mild and utterly uninteresting. Also, kind of dumb.
Her second assignment was to come up with some cliches to share with the class. Please note that this is an extremely mixed lot -- we have the full assortment of stereotypical preppy white girls and ghetto black guys and poor white trash and everything in between. She should've released how much trouble this topic would've caused.
80 minute class -- at least 30 of which was spent in stupid debates over racial stereotyping and lack thereof.
It started interestingly enough. The professor brought up interesting points about overreacting to stereotypes -- ie, a charming short story she used to have her class read about some bumblingly adorable old man, that was censored from the curriculum because they felt he portrayed elderly people as forgetful; or a cute story about two little black girls, one of whom was good at math and the other of whom was good at jump-rope, and they agreed to tutor each other in their respective good points -- banned because it portrayed blacks as being bad at math. (Look, just because one person is bad at math doesn't mean their entire race is being typecast as such. What about the little black girl who was good at math right next to her?) Maybe there were some hitches, like a stupid girl insisting that "I feel like shit" is a hideous cliche and yet "so interesting when you think about it" because it "is so descriptive, and yet not".
Okay, fine. Then a black guy in the back contributes angrily that he thinks a cliche is the trait to label all bad things black (like "black ice" or "Black Plague") and all good things white (like "little white lie"). That would've been fine as it was -- it was interesting and true -- but then he has to go and make it about race, like white and black haven't been polar opposites representing good and evil since the dawn of fucking recorded time. He said that is was actually personally offensive to him that the Black Plague, which was "invisible" and had no excuse for being called black, was termed such. Like they called it the Black Plague because they were thinking, "You know? This plague sucks. Much like those damn darkies! Let's call it the Black Plague!"
That's when the guy in the front speaks up. He is black, he is middle-aged, he is a recovering drug addict, he has been in the ghetto and on the streets, he is a victim of hate crimes, and he always has lots of opinions and lots of things to say. I love his writing and I respect what he's been through, but I wanted him to shut up before he even opened his mouth, because he went right into insisting loudly that black people are oppressed. That's how we wound up in a thirty minute debate about racial prejudices instead of literary cliches.
Between him ("White people got it good! Gee, I feel so sorry for you, being a white boy in America! No white man can understand what I'm talking about because they're not black." One of the white trash boys tries, "That's stereotyping -- what do you know about my situation? I came from the same--" "Well, yeah, but this stereotype is REAL!") and the guy in the back ("They put 'black' in front of everything negative!" Oh yeah? Well how about my black fist to your nose, then?) we couldn't get back on topic. The professor tried, in her mild, quiet way, but she never enforced it, and the loud guy in the front making the sweeping statements about white people vs black people would often go on for minutes at a time about his beliefs while nobody even tried interrupting him, because he'd just talk right over you. SHUT THE HELL UP, already; it's not like we think prejudice is a MYTH or anything, but I can physically feel my sympathy for the plight of your people draining with direct proportion to the amount of bitching you do to a crowd arguing semantics with you.
On the topic, Val composed two haiku.
Her second assignment was to come up with some cliches to share with the class. Please note that this is an extremely mixed lot -- we have the full assortment of stereotypical preppy white girls and ghetto black guys and poor white trash and everything in between. She should've released how much trouble this topic would've caused.
80 minute class -- at least 30 of which was spent in stupid debates over racial stereotyping and lack thereof.
It started interestingly enough. The professor brought up interesting points about overreacting to stereotypes -- ie, a charming short story she used to have her class read about some bumblingly adorable old man, that was censored from the curriculum because they felt he portrayed elderly people as forgetful; or a cute story about two little black girls, one of whom was good at math and the other of whom was good at jump-rope, and they agreed to tutor each other in their respective good points -- banned because it portrayed blacks as being bad at math. (Look, just because one person is bad at math doesn't mean their entire race is being typecast as such. What about the little black girl who was good at math right next to her?) Maybe there were some hitches, like a stupid girl insisting that "I feel like shit" is a hideous cliche and yet "so interesting when you think about it" because it "is so descriptive, and yet not".
Okay, fine. Then a black guy in the back contributes angrily that he thinks a cliche is the trait to label all bad things black (like "black ice" or "Black Plague") and all good things white (like "little white lie"). That would've been fine as it was -- it was interesting and true -- but then he has to go and make it about race, like white and black haven't been polar opposites representing good and evil since the dawn of fucking recorded time. He said that is was actually personally offensive to him that the Black Plague, which was "invisible" and had no excuse for being called black, was termed such. Like they called it the Black Plague because they were thinking, "You know? This plague sucks. Much like those damn darkies! Let's call it the Black Plague!"
That's when the guy in the front speaks up. He is black, he is middle-aged, he is a recovering drug addict, he has been in the ghetto and on the streets, he is a victim of hate crimes, and he always has lots of opinions and lots of things to say. I love his writing and I respect what he's been through, but I wanted him to shut up before he even opened his mouth, because he went right into insisting loudly that black people are oppressed. That's how we wound up in a thirty minute debate about racial prejudices instead of literary cliches.
Between him ("White people got it good! Gee, I feel so sorry for you, being a white boy in America! No white man can understand what I'm talking about because they're not black." One of the white trash boys tries, "That's stereotyping -- what do you know about my situation? I came from the same--" "Well, yeah, but this stereotype is REAL!") and the guy in the back ("They put 'black' in front of everything negative!" Oh yeah? Well how about my black fist to your nose, then?) we couldn't get back on topic. The professor tried, in her mild, quiet way, but she never enforced it, and the loud guy in the front making the sweeping statements about white people vs black people would often go on for minutes at a time about his beliefs while nobody even tried interrupting him, because he'd just talk right over you. SHUT THE HELL UP, already; it's not like we think prejudice is a MYTH or anything, but I can physically feel my sympathy for the plight of your people draining with direct proportion to the amount of bitching you do to a crowd arguing semantics with you.
On the topic, Val composed two haiku.
