Bonjour! :) hehe

Hello.

Now for the rundown of weekend events. :) Well, let's see . . . I don't think I did much on Friday night . . . my roommate and I kind of just stayed at home, although we did get this amazing food from a greek deli. On Saturday, we went to see a movie at the Sony Center--we saw The Brother's Grimm, which was pretty good. It was really nice to see a movie because it's been a while. Then we went to a jazz club. In our guidebook, it said it was "reasonably priced." When we got there, we realized it had changed hands and was rather pricy (we ended up paying 50 dollars with food and cover and a drink). However, the concert was awesome. The lead was a jazz/soul singer named Vanessa Mason, who had won the German equivalent of a Grammy. She was really good, and the band that played with her was also excellent. Yesterday, I mostly hung out around our homestay, but we did go out for a late dinner, and then ended up at a different jazz club/pub, though we didn't stay out too late (It was a school night! ;). Today, we had a lecture at this really cool women's center called Paula Panke. They do social work as well as provide self-help and yoga classes, and they also put on art exhibits with women's work. It was really cool. Plus, in the lecture, they ended up on the subject of what it was like when the wall came down, which was really interesting since most of them were on the Eastern side of the wall. They all have positive and negative things to say about communism. For instance, women were given equality in theory--such as full employment, free childcare, access to contraceptives, and abortion rights, although in actuality women did end up with the "double burden" of traditional gender roles. That is, they were fully employed, and then still expected to do housework, much like in a number of countries. However, under communism, only certain people could get more education, travel was restricted, goods were not available. . . I wish we could figure out a way to use socialism responsibly . . . But for most of these women, it was a really positive thing when the wall came down because they had so many more oppurtunities. One woman, however, was talking about how she was 57 when the wall came down, and she lost her job and was not able to get another.

Then this afternoon we had a class. For all our classes, we have an article (or several) to read. Most of them we have already read and wrote papers on. Today, our article was "Whiteness and European Situatedness," and I was one of the faciliators for the discussion. Basically, the article was about how most white Europeans and white Americans view whiteness as "normal" . . . and learning to look at it as its own color . . . basically, learning to think about whiteness and the implications that has for the way we view other people. Europe has had a history of not acknowledging discrimination. The US has too, but the black/white discourse has become at least a little more central . . . which in its own way is problematic . . . I think we create a dicotomy, where anyone who doesn't fit in "black or white" gets left out . . . which is problematic considering how diverse our nation is . . . in Texas, obviosly we have a large hispanic population, and there is racial tension there, but most of the time, that is left out of academic discourse. Although, as one of my friends pointed out, the goal shouldn't be to create a sort of hierarchy of reversing discrimination . . . that is, we shouldn't stop trying to solve black american issues to solve hispanic issues or asian issues or whatever . . . or qualify who has been discriminated against the worst . . . the question is, how can we move beyond looking at race as something that divides? . . . how can we move beyond race as something that is biologically constructed, when, for the most part, it is socially constructed? In Europe, they are having similar problems . . . For instance, I've heard a great deal said about differences between new migrants and idigenous people, but obviously there are people in between that who get left out.

The frustrating thing about this trip is we are continously faced with what is messed up in the world but not with any sort of solution. I guess it's our job to become part of the solution, as cliche as that is . . .

Jennifer