The book I chose is: White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement-And How I Got Out by Christian Picciolini
Paper prompt: This paper is designed to ask you to reflect on the perspectives of someone with different life experiences than your own. The larger goal is to demonstrate an ability to “take the role of the other” and understand their unique perspective as it is formed by those different lived experiences. Since there are a wide variety of books that students have chosen to read, the prompt is relatively open. This leaves you room to highlight and reflect on the particular aspects of your book that resonated with you and/or were challenging to you, without being overly prescriptive.
The paper should be 4-5 pages double spaced with the default margin and font settings.
Prompt: In this paper I want you to reflect on these major questions. You can organize them however you feel best fits your thoughts and/or the flow of the narrative of the book that you have read. In answering the questions below, you should adopt one or more of the theoretical frameworks that we’ve covered in class. Make it clear how and where this framework is informing your analysis of the book.
1. In what ways were the lived experiences of the person (or people) that your book is centered around?
a. Since this class is about race and ethnic relations, you certainly want to talk about these factors, but things like family dynamic, class, friendships, gender etc. are all important social factors that interplay with race and ethnicity.
2. How did the various “social identities” of the person shape (or people) shape their own sense of self?
a. How does this differ from your own process of self-identity (both racial/ethnic and/or any other aspects of your identity)?
3. How did the various “social identities” of the person shape their experiences with social institutions (education, the economy, peer networks, family, etc.)? What role did these experiences play in the person (or people’s) self-identity?
a. Again, how did your experiences with these institutions differ from the person/people centered in the book?
4. Reflect on how your answers about how your experience differed from those in the book would cause you and the person/people in the book to view those institutions, situations, etc. differently. Without having read this book, what aspects of their world view would you have been ignorant to? What lessons can be learned from observing these differences about how racial/ethnic processes shape our everyday experiences and interactions across racial and ethnic lines.
