What makes a SAMO important to me isn’t just the fact that I get to choose my own experience, but that I don’t have to learn solely on my own perspective and base my ideas of what I gather myself. People who challenge and force you to be willing to be disturbed are the best kind to take along. On December 26th, 2018, my friends and I went to the Chicago Cultural Center to visit the African American Designers in Chicago’s exhibit, “Art, Commerce and the Politics of Race”.
We started off the day with me driving to pick up the boys from their respective houses. I was excited because I had never driven into downtown before. But, I was scared because I’ve heard awful things about the driving habits of Chicagoans. To be honest, it wasn’t that bad. I think that people made assumptions and bias about this because most people, themselves, have not needed to drive into the city until later on in life, like me. We as Northshore “rich” kids choose to live in a bubble where we are afraid of uncomfortability. We took a 10-minute walk from our parking spot to the facility, and we got to see how busy the streets of Chicago really were.
Something that I found interesting was a case of different perspectives of a certain set of pictures within the gallery. Trent, another fellow CST classmate, perceived these pictures to be a negative way of expressing African American characteristics and habits in the 20th century. He saw of it as the media portraying them as horrifying smokers who eat an extreme amount of junk food such as Mcdonalds. Although that does seem like a decent argument, I thought of it as more of a way of creating a sense of unity between people in the United States. Family culture is a large aspect in any community, regardless of where you live. In most places, there are certain characteristics that are clearly seen to all as the “norm”, and the magazines and the media just portrayed the African Americans doing it as a way of saying, “Hey, we are just like whites, don’t separate us based off of color.” Would some people say that it is wrong for African Americans to be in these types of magazines that are setting a bad example for future generations as well as portraying all African Americans a certain way? Yes, that’s a possibility, but I do see where the media is coming from. Everything isn’t just plain black and white. There’s always going to be multiple possibilities that explain a topic or a subject in life. If we sit and argue about which one is correct, how are we going to be able to grow and expand our thinking? Our willingness to be disturbed would not be challenged, but it would be afraid to step foot into the real world.
As a minority, I also sometimes see myself trying to express characteristics that might seem off to some people because it doesn’t fit my “profile” of being Asian. I like to be extremely into fitness and do certain things like walk around Woodfield Mall, and play football with my teammates. We like to eat American food such as cheeseburgers, onion rings, and fries occasionally on a weekday, and we function how a normal American family would.
Whenever I go to Chicago, I feel as though it is due to an obligation that restricts me from truly see what exactly is going on there. As we walked from the parking lot to the facility, I noticed homeless people begging for money with signs. But they would never communicate with us. As they lay on the cold floor, I began to feel that each one of them had a sense of learned helplessness, a Psychology term that is used to describe an organism losing sight of a purpose due to the thinking that all trails lead to the same outcome of failure.
I’m glad to have gone to Chicago with an open mind that SAMOS aren’t supposed to be obligations, but a time to reflect and make use of the time spent to take a look at it from multiple lenses.
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