Hello everyone I am back. Needless to say this is my last semester in the south. This is also my last semester as an undergrad as well. I will be leaving the south next year heading to North Carolina.  My daughter has to have surgery and her needs come first within my life and my time.  I have enjoyed this class. I learned plenty about the south that was not known before this class. Things from the article on Race and Ethnicity. Before discussing this article, I never knew it existed. After reading and browsing through this article, I learned how economic, cultural, and weather affects the Hispanic s and Asians tremendously based on the year and the metropolitan area to which they live. Also, as far as college is concerned, the enrollment rates are increasing but the completion rate is declining. Whites and Asians are more likely to finish versus blacks and Hispanics as well. We as a class focused this entire semester on southern identity. I also thought that the blacks threw themselves at the White masters in order to be pleasantly raped. Instead I found out that was just a common myth. That was the idea of the southern white identity. We also took apart another southern identity theme of movies and videos. We watched the Ms. Jackson video by Outcast; I now know that their southern identity was everything can be messed up, doors could be swinging,  holes could be in the ceilings,  and rain could be pouring down but we as blacks will still persevere. It was not until that day that I truly became knowing of the southern identity that is around me. I have always been a fan of The Housewives of Atlanta.  This particular day we watched a clip of it in class. At first I was just watching it, as always,  but when it was time to dissect this show clipping I was in awe. Those upper upper class black women & white woman still used and had the mind frame of slavery and definitely we not in tune to what they were doing nor what was going on. Since they reside in Atlanta,  that is the south and the south is considered a place where poverty is but within these housewives wealth has increased.  These women are famous and still have nannies and drivers just as in slavery. I also had the opportunity to see things i have never saw nor knew about.  Like the movie named Deliverance.  This movie was a horror film created in 1976. This movie brought about a different class status between rural and urban. The rural area meant it was the south and poor with poverty. The urban was the upper class. I always heard about inbreeding which is incest but I did not know it was true. Within this movie everyone shared a common culture religion,  music, and food as well as being in a small town. I appreciate this class because I learned more about me as well as others.

photo essay

https://blogs.memphis.edu/dirtysouth/files/2013/11/photo-essay-1obef9g.docx

Ten dollars an hour, Sigma Nu

This clip was about a lady name Lisa who worked for ten dollars an hour. She worked 6-6:30 three days out of the week and 9-2:30 two days a week. There was plenty of discrimination going on within this Sigma Nu house. The house mom ran the entire show. She planned the menu, ordered the food, and oversaw the workers. Lisa and the other cook worked five days a week, cooked and prepared three meals a day all from scratch. Lisa was actually hurting from the pay raise when the house mother cut another worker from the schedule. The house worker receives benefits and insurance when she does not do any work yet her workers receive none of that. Lisa was a hard worker and loved to please the Sigma Nu boys. These ties back into the south due to slavery. The slaves were always hard-working, happy, and loyal to their slave owner because he never asked the slaves how they felt. He did not care.

Same as with the University of Memphis workers not even making ten dollars an hour and even though they are custodial workers, they still are going above and beyond the role of custodian. These custodian workers clean buildings by themselves and are either old or young. I always see the same old women working in the UC cleaning trays, mopping, sweeping, and taking out the trash as if their age doesn’t qualify them to cashier or serve guests. I feel as though they can do it as well. This is really bothering me because I used to work for  McDonald’s and they claim to be an equal opportunity employer when in reality, they would not hire an older person for the simple fact that they did not want them to come in running the show. In other words, they did not want the older person stealing the respect from them and their role of manager or GM within the McDonald’s corporation. I remember my GM (whom is no longer employed through McDonald’s) told an older woman that she was overqualified in her face and when she left he told his swing shift manager he did not need her telling him what to do.

He sent her to another location and there she was hired. It’s sad that our own people want to keep us oppressed and enslaved under them. I am now hearing that McDonald’s will start paying people $15 an hour.  If that is to happen I will reapply with them. Every time I visit to order my meals I see the same people who have been there years on end and have yet to move to 8.00 an hour. I just spoke to my old co-worker yesterday and she was there in the ninth grade now she has graduated from high school and still is not making 8.00 an hour. She is having to work McDonald’s and Target at the same time because she is trying to go to college and has no help. It’s a shame that people can work a job for quite some time and still see no difference in change.

I have a brother who has the recessive trait of sickle cell. He has a son Derrin, who has the complete sickle cell disease. Derrin is the sweetest two years old I have ever known but, because his cells are shaped like a sickle, he can’t walk. His mother has the recessive trait as well which when she and my brother had him they knew their son had sickle cell from the beginning. Derrin isn’t sick everyday but when he does get sick, he is in the hospital for days. The doctors are mostly trying to get him to sleep while working on the pain to resolve within his body. He cries a lot so we as a family never know when he is in pain or not. The doctors say whenever he is screaming and crying, then he is in pain. He takes three different medications daily in the winter time because he has asthma as well so they do not want anything making him worse with the cold weather. Derrin has to be held all the time because he can’t tell us what’s wrong with him. My brother and his son’s mother are black, which is why this book hit home for me. Just for the whites thinking that this was a black person’s disease was absurd. Derrin’s mother and my brother did not want to get tested for sickle cell while she was pregnant because they feel as though they already knew the outcome of the results. This is exactly what the people did in the book and they lived longer through the pain and this disease because this disease is actually fighting off Malaria. On Thursday, my group has the number five issue with how race was invisible then they paid attention to sickle cell and then it declined. In doing this class exercise, it gave me more insight after I read the conclusion and had the discussion in class about how at first the doctors wanted the black people to be able to work but they also needed some blacks to be sick so that they could experiment on them to see how to cure this disease. Once the healthcare was becoming more and more funded by federal and private dollars the healthcare industrial complex began to grow. Once that began to grow, doctors began focusing on more prominent diseases such as cancer and so forth pushing sickle cell downward in the decline in attention to this disease. In this book, dying in the city of the Blues I realized plenty dealing with the south that I had not known about Memphis before. I thought Beale Street was for black people and now I barely see blacks on Beale except for a weekend night. I learned plenty about sickle cell trait and disease that I did not know before. Things like they claimed it to be a black people’s disease. I also learned that Vas Crump was helping blacks as we were helping him with his voting and his machine. This was an interesting book and topic. I am happy to share my story.

I am very enthused to be giving my story on this blog. although this is my first time blogging, I am excited. My sweetheart and I have been dating for seven years. We have an awesome almost one year old daughter on October 4, 2013. He feels like I can not tell him any different about him & his musical career. He is an up and rising artist/writer/ rapper. Don’t get me wrong I truly am happy for him. I do not want to take away anything from him but he is the one that has made it and I feel as if he does not owe anyone anything who did not help him get there. He always says “Don’t worry about it.” or “I don’t know about how they played a specific part in his life on his come up.” The way I see it is he started out in our living room of our home, no one else’s. No one but his immediate family which is: sisters, brother-in-law, mother, and I are the only one’s that traveled with him, saw him grit and grind, helped him, gave him our last, risked getting no sleep for the loud sound of his studio in our home, etc. None of his friends except maybe three have been along for the rough risky ride. His stage name is Young Gwola. He is good, but he does not owe a debt to society or his high school friends unless they were there then and now not just showing up because he posted on Facebook he has a meeting with Atlantic Records this weekend.  Whose to say that he will sign any type of a contract with anyone yet.? He may just be outweighing his options to see how he can expand and how far he will go. I know people show up when people they know have money, but I am very uncomfortable with him making promises already as if he has signed anything to try and rebuild these so called “friends” lives and take care of them. He does not owe them anything but support and advice on how to get where he has gotten. He has been doing shows for free since he has started, most people would not do that but he saw that as his internship opportunity to get his credentials up and make his name for himself become known. Just reminds me of Hustle and Flow so much to the point I stressed that to him. He made it on his own like he is the Ludacris and the “new people” are Cuba Gooding. I just wish he would listen to me and sit down and analyze what he is telling these people who approach him expecting him to make a change for them because they attended Southside High school together. Once he realizes that he does not owe anyone anything except for maybe the ones that has truly been by his side supporting him since day one then he and I will be just fine. This is a link to one of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAGRxfKlqMY&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

Hope you like it.