HW #34 The Cool Pose and Various Approaches to Life Rooted in Class, Race, Gender, Age, etc.

I find that the cultures that we live in affect the way people think about things and which affects their actions. But, I think the way the society think about the culture adds more "fuel" (either good or bad) to that certain culture. The surroundings that we live in, the people that we interact with changes our ideas in how we want to set our paths. The more the society pushes their ideas on the people, especially to the teens and children, the more they will think its best for them to follow what the society is saying. They may rebel against what the society is saying or what their culture wants them to do or what their parents wants them to follow; but then they will be put under another's culture, is what I see from my own experiences and from reading the article, "A Poverty of the Mind".

I see that we all don't want to lose our "face", or to be embarrassed so we try to cover it up so the attention would go back on the "cool" side. Everybody wants the word "respect" to be shown to them through the actions of others. To have respect, it makes us feel much better but the respect doesn't have to be in a system of power control way. Rather, I think its when we are mostly strangers to each other that we want respect but if its between friends and close ones, the level of respect changes. Then there is also the cultural respect we want from the other cultures. From the article, it says that the young black men, after getting the "cool-pose" in them, they got themselves "a great deal of respect from white youths". To be "real cool", like from the poem "We Real Cool" of that role of coolness, one must act like what the poem is suggesting. However, it only brings death more to yourself as the poem suggests many different ways to kill yourself.

I feel that the Black culture are always getting compared a lot and I think that when we are feel respect, it helps the culture raise the reputation more. It is cool that the black culture has bought in a lot of the music like hip hop and I find that the way they speak is very cool...well, more towards the older (wiser) people than younger. I think it is because the older people have live longer so they got to experience more change and learn more things than the younger ones so their way of speaking sounds more respectful. Unlike the younger ones, whom I see on streets and when listening to them, they are quite scary and I just feel like shaking my head at them (not all of them). In the article, it said that the white youths have the sense of when they should get out their books when it is time but for the black youths, the music world and the street world is all they got. I find that the way they want to be cool limits their chances in the academic world. Once they follow a leader, or be in a gang, their decisions seems to be always centering around the gang. It feels as if they don't know that they have a future (that might be better for them) so they must act now. Their world centers around the choices that they have made in the present and the way they see the culture from their own view and from the society offers less chances for them to decide.

I find that our culture and the way society sees it puts pressure on the actions we put out. Like being in the general Asians, we "should" be the smart ones and if we are smart, we have to keep it up. Or like being in the advance class, we are the "advanced" ones so we need to be smart about it. It feel as if words and images are the mainstream way of dealing with how we express what's put forth for a certain category like our cultures. Then I think we get the feeling that if we want to be treated right, we need to be cool about what our culture's popular thing is; as well as adding with other culture to show the diversity-ness in ourselves.

However, we put pressure on each others culture; but we also take from others culture, so is that fair for the cultures? Like how the Black created the hip hop and in the past, the cool jazz stuff, and then we incorporated it into our lives. They benefit us so we treat them a bit better but then once the situations get worse, we treat them worse. In "Learning to Labour", how the lads are making themselves look cool and "showed little interest in academic work" and etc, it shows how the lads are taking, from what I observed, how the Black culture does their poses. Even though the two cultures' cultural map of "coolness" is colliding with each other, there is always some differences as what the privileges are different. As well as the way we see the culture and the people, giving them our opinions/judgments, which results in the respect of the culture to go down. Like what we talked in class, how our cultural map changes if we have another map to create a combination of both but the actions when the combinations are mixed changes too. I think this is why in the article, that how the Black culture is not successful is because of the people's comments and their way to pressure the Black culture in doing what the people are suggesting. (I hope anyone who reads this get what I'm saying...sorry...)

Since the society that we live in, America has diverse cultures, so the multi-culture society adding all together creates a combination of comments. But the "cool pose" that we created needs to be in there in order for us to get the attention/respect that we wanted. I think it connects to the value that the culture is lacking to give us so then we go and try to create something that can be called "cool". We want to be "credited" so we try to build, act for a choice/path that leads us to somewhere. I don't think cool is misleading us but it is us who has build cool to be influencing us to deal with what we have in our lives. Certainly, I don't mean what it is already placed in front of us, like who we are born into but the surroundings/development of our childhood/and whatever that influences us forces us to change our thinking.