Hi everyone! My name is Alaina Losito. I am an English major (French minor) and I will be a senior this year at Cortland. I am still deciding between two things I would like to pursue after I graduate from Cortland. I would either like to go into journalism or I would like to be a professor and concentrate in either women’s literature or African American literature. I am currently doing online classes at home this semester due to COVID which is sad because I love the Cortland Campus and I love learning in the classroom but I guess this is the new norm now right?
This summer I spent a lot of time playing with my dogs, reading, doing at home workouts, and swimming. The weather has been really nice in Syracuse, which is where I live, so I spent a lot of time outside reading by the pool and swimming. My friend and I also went to visit my one friend in Long Island. We went to Fire Island one day which was really fun and of course the bagels down there are amazing (I made sure to bring lots back home)! Though there were the fun parts to summer, there were also the downs too. Hearing about all of the police brutality going on created a need in me to educate myself more on the systemic racism in our society. I educated myself by watching the documentary “13” on Netflix which is about the crime rates of African Americans. The documentary went over how negative portrayals of African Americans in the media are created and how this leads to further racism and convictions of people due to their race (one example would be the Drug Wars in America). I also started reading a book called How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. This book teaches ways to implement antiracism into your everyday life and how racist ideas have been imbedded into our minds for years and years. Though I know I have a long way to come in educating myself, I tried to spend a lot of summer looking up ways to help and educate myself and others on this topic.
Some questions/topics I would like to learn more and discuss in this class are:
- How to educate and get through to people on the societal issues surrounding the topics of Race/Gender/Sex. For me personally I have found it hard to get through to people who are close minded. These people are the ones who try to say that “All Lives Matter” and “Not all Cops are Bad” and I tell them that they are wrong and I try to explain why but they won’t listen to me. Or another situation would be me telling people that certain TikTok trends are demeaning to women but think I’m just being too much of a feminist.
- Discuss why being a feminist is viewed at as a negative thing by many men in our society and even some women. Also how can we change this so that being a feminist is viewed at as something positive?
