Thursday, September 23, 2010
ORC 9/22/2010
Our ORC group summarized that Puritans' idea of surrendering yourself to God as a means to true freedom is definitely not an American idea. We talked about how Americans tend to think of freedom as having no restraints. We also discussed Takaki's proposal that many American citizens don't consider Asian, African, or Latin Americans as true members of our society. Takaki describes that we consider non-European Americans to be foreigners, even though European Americans are not the majority of our population. He gives a great example of a European American cab driver being surprised when a fellow Asian American speaks fluent English. Our ORC group also talked about Zinn's clear biases in his introduction. We concluded that it is important to identify what we agree and disagree with while reading a text. Every text has some sort of valuable message.
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Dan,
ReplyDeleteWhy bias? Might these rather be thought of as commitments?
DeAne
(p.s. I think I fixed the problem on my blog.)
DeAne,
ReplyDeleteIs there a way to be notified when somebody comments on my blog?
Anyways, I think that commitments are definitely a good thing. However, when commitments become so strong that the opposing views are not even considered, the commitments become identified as biases. I think that Zinn's introduction is very blunt and uninviting because of his biases. We talked about how good writing invites the reader to converse with the text. I feel like Zinn is lecturing his audience, as opposed to discussing the topics and referring to both sides of each argument.
Those are just some of my thoughts... I admit that I am not always right though!
Dan