As I rode the elevator, I overheard a conversation between two African American adults.They were talking about one of their bosses and one said, “People who are not Black do not understand the prejudices and oppression we have gone through.”
As I left the elevator and walked into the doctor’s office, I was handed a clipboard with some required forms I needed to fill out.One section caught my attention: Race.It asked me to check a box.I immediately thought about the conversation I just heard, and looked over my choices, Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander.I then thought about prejudices and oppression for each choice.
Many thanks to Deborah Levine, editor of the American Diversity Report, for assisting in sharing my work with the ADR. I’ve been part of IT field for a long time and have presented on Big Data, technology in education. I have also been part of Takelessons.com in teaching SQL.
I used to teach RDBMS for new employees in 1998, then taught in Oracle University on RDBMS, SQL in 1999-2003. I have taught also PeopleSoft University on the Workflow. And have taught as a Mentor for Cyber Patriot in the year 2019 locally in Summerville, SC. Let’s take a look at how IT has evolved and what’s coming up in the future.
In the 1960s, sociologist Harold Garfinkel founded a new field of inquiry called ethnomethodology. As such, Garfinkel uses the term indexing to describe how we depend on whatever information and experience we have to make sense of every social context. We call this social cues. For example, when a man in the US meets a person who is wearing a dress and a pair of high heels while carrying a lady’s purse, the man instantly concludes that this is a woman and therefore will instantaneously interact with this person according to the social etiquette between a man and a woman.
Garfinkel calls such mental exercise indexing. When we are unaware of social cues because we have not had interaction with members of a particular social group, we would depend on the common information available, whether true or not. This is when stereotyping comes into play.
So I perform your rites of acceptable outrage
Though your anger, so loud
Accomplishes so little
Still, I send my sternly worded letters
Call and voice my grave concerns
I share fact-checked articles
And funny but pointed memes
I go to one of the facilities
And get pepper-sprayed
Peacefully protesting outside
It’s not enough, of course
How could it be, when they are holding
Children in cages? Continue reading Caged by Marsheila Rockwell→
218 years of enslavement and 137 years of segregation have left Bermudians struggling with the legacies of intergenerational trauma and economic inequities across our society. A culture of silence and fear arose ensuring that past was suppressed and not talked about. People speak of the need to work together and the need for unity, however, the racial divide is widening, economic disparity between the races continues to grow, and social media is both educating and inflaming passions.
With direct descendants of enslaved people and slaveowners still living on the island, and sharing in many cases the same last name, we needed to find a way to speak to the divide and bring light and truth to our understanding of that past.
Cousin Mack from upstate Maine
snapped his syllables clean
and crisp like green beans
dropped in my grandmother’s lap.
Jimmy Joe from Arkansas
plopped his words like handfuls
of new Irish potatoes
tossed into a bucket so we
missed the sound of some.
And cousin Marlow from Georgia
extruded his, pushed them out
like sausage, long fluid flow
with soft, squishy pauses
and periods held and strung out
so they seemed like dashes.
Image credit: Just A Pinch Recipe Club superimposed with Microsoft WordArt
I had heard The Drifters’ song,
played Monopoly—knew
the expensive property was paired
with Park Place, that rent
for houses and hotels could
bankrupt a person.
It was the first day of the new academic term and our batch was bubbling with excitement. Our surgery posting had finally dawned. Now was our chance to step into the operation theatre and watch first hand as surgeons washed up and dutifully, saved lives. When most medical students envision medicine as a career, prior to entering medical school, they more often than not dream about wearing scrubs and operating to the rhythmic beats of all the life support and monitoring machines. Without doubt, the first visit to the operation theatre is one of the most cherished memories of any medical student.
We were assigned to our units and were very warmly received by our senior consultants. Cases were allotted for observation and by rotation, we were even allowed to wash up and assist in the procedures. It was a thrilling experience as we got to take incisions and operate laparoscopic instruments under expert supervision and this led to the birth of an unextinguishable spark that caused many of my colleagues to decide upon surgery as a future career choice.
Sleep’s body resting like a Chevy 4×4 slammed into a tree. Yeah, I lived, it says, as a million drunk ballerinas. As an arabesque upside down & backward. A papalote fractured. A windowsill made of broken tibias.
His ziggurat terraced by aggression, stone scored into steps like Isabel’s hipbones. Nothing from him has ever escaped, not so much a microfiche wheeze or lawnmower’s razor-thin snore, not his carnival of women, buck tooth, ferris-wheeled, first kiss, & hiss. Light without radiance, a circle deviant under construction.
Out of respect, birds drip the sky like stale coffee, dissimulate the parking lot where some automobiles stand unshelled. I shut my eyes the way I slam a door—puncture sleep, letting all this air out bored of its solitary room. His face is half-covered by blanket. He doesn’t dream.
218 years of enslavement and 137 years of segregation have left Bermudians struggling with the legacies of intergenerational trauma and economic inequities across our society. A culture of silence and fear arose ensuring that past was suppressed and not talked about. People speak of the need to work together and the need for unity, however, the racial divide is widening, economic disparity between the races continues to grow, and social media is both educating and inflaming passions.
