Unit 2 Response 2
Reading Response 2.2
“Fashioning Lives” really made me think about the lack of diversity in most peoples’ everyday lives, mine included. In high school, the student body was roughly 55% black and Hispanic and about 40% white (the other 5% was Asian.) My neighborhood growing up was and even my current neighborhood is almost completely white. This is something I never realized because of two reasons: I have never seen race as a dividing factor and I really don’t ever leave the house unless I have to go to work or take the kids to school and daycare. Now that I think about it though, the only thing that really offers any diversity to my neighborhood is the economic class that everyone belongs to – most of us are working class, some are low income working class, and there are a few that more white collar.
I also ran into several terms that I had to look up because I had either never heard them or I had not seen them used in the context that Pritchard used them in. For example, I had only ever heard jezebel used in reference to sexually promiscuous women or briefly referenced in Bible study growing up and never as a racial slur. Also, I had heard queer as a derogatory word or to describe something that out of the ordinary, but I was not aware that it was a distinct identifier of one’s sexual orientation.