Journal Two: My First Blog Post

Hey, my name is Dillan Hooper. I am an English major, and I am a senior. I work part time as a customer service associate at one of the local stores here in Marion. I've been working in customer service for over two years now. It turns out that I don't want to spend my life working at the bottom of a convenience store, so I guess I am excited to finish my education so that I can make my great escape from there. Currently, I am starting my own family, which only further encourages me to wrap up my college education and begin to take those big steps into "the real world." Being a family man was my fun fact for the class, so that may be a fair way to remember who I am.

This is an older picture of me, but it is what I found when I googled myself...

The biggest theme that stuck out to me was how subtly racist our media can be. Now, I wasn't oblivious to this racism prior to reading this chapter, but reading these few pages did allow me to reflect on how dramatically the common perception of Arabian culture has been changed since my own childhood. I remember a point in time in which a child could think of Arabs or Arabia and their mind would turn toward genies, vast deserts, ancient mysteries, and golden palaces. Now, it seems that even in the most basic forms of media the topic of Arab culture is either wholly avoided or the Arab people are depicted as barbaric extremist, which this depiction is made to demonize them or mock them. I think that it is important that we all recognize this theme of racism in our media because there are Arabs that are simply normal people attempting to live their lives, and these people deserve to be treated with the same common decency and respect that we attempt to give to all people in this modern age.