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Through my exhibition of artifacts, I hope to display and express my identites through a variety of aspects. I want to be able to portray the point that hapiness comes from within and of course external factors may contribute to this, but ultimately one must be happy with themselves before they can provide others with happiness or pursue external happiness. This realization fully came to me rather recently and I feel as though the sooner that one is able to recoginize and truly understand this, the closer one will find true and sincere happiness. Finding oneself and understanding the identity one holds will help them to percieve the world in ways they may never realize that they could.

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Each and everyone of us have several different aspects that make up our identity. With this, we are forced to grow and learn in a white patriarchal society experiencing many different things in a variety differnt ways based on the aspects of our identities. I am very aware that I am afforded more oppurtunities due the color of my skin and my sexuality which would put me in the category of privelaged. On the other hand I also face the daily challenges of a young oppressed female. I think it is important to be aware of both identities and where they cross which could be labeled as intersectionality.

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Choosing a single word to describe myself several years ago would of been a great struggle for me, but as I am growing and learning, I find it to be much easier to choose the word passion. Passion is a great strength of mine, but it has also been a weakness of mine as well. It has turned me into a perfectionist, and although this may be a positive for some things, it also leads high expectations of myself that sometimes cannot or may not be met. When these expectations are not met, it leads to harsh disappoinments within myself that may be greater than what the average person experiences.

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"The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow"(Rankine). Living in the past is harmful. This is a difficult thing to wrap ones head around which I feel is a part of the mental health aspect of my identity. We must live in the moment. Staying out of the future and out of the past will allow us to take in life in the way it should be seen. Anxiety of the future and regret from the past may hinder prosperity of the present.

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"Brave doesnt mean you're not scared. It means you go on even though you're scared"(Thomas). I believe that this quote describes the mental health aspect of my identity. Daily struggles are faced and understanding how you respond to them and trying to uncomplicate your feelings is a big part of life that I know I continue to face. Everything is not always black and white and it takes patience in understanding yourself and your feelings.

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"In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is a founding myth of this society" (Luiselli). This is one of my favorite quotes in this essay. It contributes to my identity, because it emphasizes the privelage that I have of being white and worry free from being deported. I think its extremely important to recognize this. Recognizing this may mean saving others around you from drowning in the white patriarchy that our country is.

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When browsing poems I came upon the one labeled Earth Day. Not only am I passionate about caring for our world, and saving our Earth, but this poem spoke to me in a different way as well. Yolen describes being one with Earth, and although we all have different identities, when putting things into perspective, we are human beings. This poem could serve as a reminder that we are all ultimately the same and come from the same place despite our differences. If the color of our skin, gender, sexuality, or any other aspect of our identity is different, it can never change the fact that we are all human. "I am the Earth, And the Earth is me".

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Earth Day by Jane Yolen | Poetry Foundation

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When reading this poem in class, I appreciated the meaning behind it. The ambiguity allowed the reader to make what they wanted of it. Every individual is marked in a different way due to to their own unique experiences percived differently due to their unique idnetities. I am marked by experiencing specific things in identity of a white, heterosexual, middle-class female. I value the line "Make your mark proud, and open". I think Tafolla is conveying the point that an individual should make their "mark" confidently as well through the metaphor of using ink, mud, or berries instead of a pencil. She says this so that no one can "erase" YOU.

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Download full issues of Reflections in PDF format(issues up through Spring 2020), suitable for printing or sharing.

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Rosie the Riveter was a very important universal image because she represented the fact that women are good for more than just keeping the house and serving their spouse. She represents the strength of women and that they are strong enough to more than just house work. Women are a necessary component to our society despite the fact that they are not given the credit they deserve and are constantly told otherwise. Women are both physically and mentally strong and necessary in our world. This image is so important because it is a reminder to know and understand our worth as females regardless of what those around us have to say.

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Karyn Marshall was the winner of the first Women's World Championship in Weightlifting held in 1987. Holding a women's weightlifing competition was a large step in history for our world. Women began shattering the stereotypes created for them. I, myself, am passionate about weightlifting, and although I am shattering gender stereotypes, I face judgemental looks and remarks when visting the gym. Men see females lifting heavy weights and automatically think this is not right, and that women should remain "frail and feminine. This image is important to showing the empowerment and strength of females which is a massive part of my identity.

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On July 13th, 1848 the Women's Rights movement begin. Women began to realize their value and that they deserved equal oppurtunities. I am passionate about women being seen as equals to men. Rather than being seen as inferior and weak women are such powerful beings with both physical and mental strength. This is a standard of mine which greatly contributes to my identity and the ways in which I percieve and live my life. I still consider myself a feminist and see great importance in understanding the value the women do hold in our society despite the fact that our country is not built for them. Do to our patriarchal lifestyle women continue to fight the degrading comments that may be thrown their way.

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This performance of a poetry slam really grabbed my attention when viewing it. This boy was 14 years old when writing and performing this and I found this to be extremely moving. For him to be so young, and be able to recognize the advantages and disadvantages different identities provided each individual is very powerful. My favorite part of this performance was when he told the boys to start acting like women. Any other male would take this remark as degrading. I believe that this being performed as a slam poem allowed for greater emphasis and conveyed the powerful message.

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White Boy Privilege, written and performed by Royce Mann

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When discovering this video, I was struck by the fact that this was our depressing reality. Although it may not highlight one of my identities specifically, I think that its important to understand others identities as well. We must not be ignorant to those around us just because they do not completely effect how we live our lives. Many hidden meanings and historical events are within the background of this video and it is impossible to pick up on all of them through watching the video just once. I think that this video is so powerful in a way because of the satirical tone of it. It begins with upbeat vibes and as soon as the beat drops you begin to realize what America is truly about.

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Childish Gambino - This Is America (Official Video)

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Living in the Age of the White Mob- Victor Luckerson

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Living in the Age of the White Mob- Victor Luckerson

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I always knew that being white has afforded me privelages that others will not be given. It was not until I took this class that I became self aware and was able to understand to what extent this truly was the case. The following quote highlights the way in which America is built for white privelage. "The white mob exists outside of the American mythology, but it has long shaped the nations reality". When reading this essay, I understood that white individuals continue to get away with hate crimes because they hold a very specific privelage that no one else can be afforded. White will always be a part of my identity and I think being self aware can help me see things from other perspectives.

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For most of the hundred and fifty-six years since the Civil War, white mobs have had free rein over American society. They burned Black schools during Reconstruction, strung Black bodies from trees during the lynching era, and harassed Black students during the civil-rights movement. These were acts of racism, but they were also flexes of political power-murderous demands that the legal and cultural norms of the rioters' world reign forever, or else be replaced by death and chaos.

The white mob exists outside of American mythology, but it has long shaped the nation's reality. Consider Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a group of armed whites destroyed the city's thriving Black business district, in 1921, burning thirty-five square blocks and killing as many as three hundred people. It has been a century since the Tulsa Race Massacre and still, when people learn about it, they express shock, as if it is a surprising outlier. As if, in the same time period, white mobs did not terrorize Rosewood, Florida; and Elaine, Arkansas; and East St. Louis, Illinois. As if a white mob did not descend on Washington, D.C., itself in July, 1919, when President Woodrow Wilson allowed racial violence to escalate in the nation's capital for several days.

Members of white mobs do not have to mask their faces; they do not need the protection of a "conspiracy of silence." Being part of a white mob has rarely been a crime. These tactics, when adopted, are done to instill fear, and also for pleasure and excitement. The white mob gains power not from secrecy but from its explicit endorsement within white society. Across the United States, the Tulsa massacre dominated newspaper front pages; one local editorial declared, "the old 'Niggertown' must never be allowed in Tulsa again." Rioters took pictures in front of the burning buildings and collected postcards of the carnage. If Facebook Live and selfie sticks had existed, members of the mob would have broadcast their destruction to the world in real time, too.

White mobs may embarrass some of their social betters, but that disagreement is more over appearances than ideology. The Tulsa World, in 1921, saw the race massacre as a branding problem, and argued for restoring Greenwood "not because of affectionate regard for the colored man, but . . . for the white race whose boast of superiority must now be justified." Last week, as Donald Trump watched a mob storm the Capitol, he reportedly complained that the rioters looked " low-class."

A white mob views itself as an extension of the law, not a repudiation of it. The Ku Klux Klan reëmerged in the nineteen-twenties as an insurgency against the crime and amorality that it said gripped the nation. In Oklahoma, its ranks included many members of the white élite-doctors, judges, police commissioners. "Many highly educated men-prominent men-thought it would be a good thing," Margaret Wilsey, a white Tulsan whose husband was in the Klan, in the twenties, recalled in a 1972 interview. "They would help 'law and order.' " This mindset explains how a pro-Trump crowd brandishing pro-police flags could mutate into a violent mob that attacked and injured cops, killing one officer. "You should be on our side," a Trump supporter told officers outside the Capitol last week, according to the Washington Post. " 'We the people' means police, too!"

In the years before the election of President Trump, the white mob was most often portrayed as a historical artifact, trapped in unnerving black-and-white photographs of a bygone era. But the mob never really left the places where it had taken root. In 1956, at my alma mater, the University of Alabama, a white mob chased the first Black student, Autherine Lucy, around campus, trapping her in the library after peppering her with rotten eggs-and, through threats of continued violence, compelled the school to suspend her. Lucy is still alive today. When I attended Alabama, a decade ago, white students dressed up in Confederate uniforms and marched around campus every year, play-acting the most infamous white mob in U.S. history. These same students were members of a century-old, all-white secret society called the Machine, which, in 1993, physically assaulted a white female student near campus after burning a cross in her yard, because she ran for student-body president without their endorsement. In 2015, at the University of Oklahoma, which is located in the former "sundown town" of Norman, white fraternity students sang, in a recorded video, "You can hang him from a tree, but he'll never sign with me. There will never be a nigger at S.A.E." For some white people, being part of a white mob is the equivalent of a rebellious teen-age phase.

The white mob's work is political, advancing the white agenda in ways that courts and elections cannot. After committing acts of terror, its members go on about their lives. They bear no life-defining scarlet letter. Recently, I talked to a man named Mark Celeste, who believes that his grandfather, Benjamin Fowler, participated in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Fowler was a railroad worker in Tulsa and, at one point, a member of the Ku Klux Klan. When Celeste was fifteen, his father, a staunch Italian liberal who married into a conservative family, told him and his brothers that their grandfather had taken part in the destruction of Greenwood. It would be another sixty years before Celeste shared the information with his own children, via text message. Celeste condemns the acts of the mob and believes the events of the massacre should be more widely known, but he doesn't personally feel shame over his grandfather's role. "I'll be honest with you. I heard about it then, and then just sort of vaguely catalogued it in my mind," he told me. "Unless something specifically spurs you, it's not gonna be thought of-which is terrible, because there are many things that happened that were important that get forgotten."

The white mob is a criminal conspiracy with no criminals, a historical menace floating outside popular history, a flouting of American ideals draped in the American flag. It is a marvel that white people, for short periods of time, stopped making use of such a potent political tool.

Despite the stomach-churning similarities, 2021 is not 1921. The white mob is now turning against the state, threatening the lives of elected officials, desecrating their sacred chambers, and attacking police officers, because the state has failed to uphold its end of the power-hungry mob's bargain. For more than a century, Black people have argued that white-mob lawlessness is a threat to their communities, most specifically, but also to members of a democratic society as a whole. "Mob law is dangerous and will undermine the foundations of any government that permits it," warned Greenwood's Black newspaper, the Tulsa Star, in 1915. "Unless this monster is subdued in this country serious trouble is sure to follow."

Now we will see whether white people choose to listen-and federal prosecutors will play a key role in forcing them to hear. Blame for participating in or inciting a mob should be applied to individual actors based on evidence, with criminal punishments that aim to deter future mob activity. To blame violence on general social ills or cultural divisions is to hand-wave away the problem, as white Tulsans did after the race massacre. After last week's insurrection, Representative Markwayne Mullin, of Oklahoma, told the Tulsa World, "No one is to blame here. We are all to blame," heaping fault for the insurrection on Democrats, Republicans, journalists, and people on social media-but not President Trump. There is hope that others will address the attack more seriously. So far, more than a hundred people have been arrested by the F.B.I., the Washington Metropolitan Police, or the U.S. Capitol Police for participating in the riot. On Wednesday, Democrats, joined by ten Republicans, impeached Trump in the House of Representatives for inciting a mob at the Capitol. But a Senate trial likely will not occur until after Trump leaves office, and it may drag on for weeks. It's unclear whether the passions of the moment will translate into long-term political will.

The mob's activity must be intensively investigated, documented, and publicized. When Tulsa assembled a grand jury in the summer of 1921 to investigate the massacre, the all-white body found that "agitation among the negroes for social equality" was a primary driver of the violence, and blamed Black people for inciting a riot. Seventy years later, when a state-appointed riot commission identified sites of potential mass graves holding massacre victims, the city called off a search for the dead at the last minute. These were failures not of the mob but of the citizens and elected officials who failed to use their legal powers to uncover it. Now Tulsa is trying for a third time to investigate the massacre, at the same time that the federal government is embarking on a first attempt to explain what happened at the Capitol. We can hope that it won't take as long for federal officials to uncover the truth in Washington as it has taken in Oklahoma.

Most critically, the core grievances of the mob must be rejected, because they are specious. The Tulsa Race Massacre was sparked by a false rape allegation, which was propped up by a sensational newspaper account. Today, people like Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, who serves on the 1921 Race Massacre Centennial Commission, should see the danger in stoking false public fears that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. At the exact moment that the Capitol was breached, Lankford was on the Senate floor, defending his planned vote to object to the election results. After witnessing the intensity of a white mob firsthand, Lankford switched his vote but hedged. He insisted that election security was an "important issue that needs to be resolved," despite the fact that officials in all fifty states and more than eighty judges certified the accuracy of the 2020 election results. Mealymouthed ambiguity about whether democracy has or hasn't been subverted is the oxygen that allows a white mob to rage-and to feel righteous about it.

Throughout American history, the white mob has expressed the will of large portions of the white populace. So it is today-forty-five per cent of Republicans said that they supported the Capitol siege, according to a YouGov poll. We live in a country that gestures toward egalitarianism, but, ultimately, white people retain the money, the levers of government, and the raw power. The white mob is a reminder of this plain fact, which lingers in the national psyche long after the mob's specific actions have been scrubbed from living memory. The white mob persists, in part, because it is not a source of national shame, nor of many people's personal shame. The authors of American dogma left the white mobs out when they taught us, as children, historical parables of good and evil. Now some ask us, as adults, to brush aside the mob's actions and believe in democracy. Until the historical and modern truth of white-mob violence becomes part of our understanding of what it means to be American, these mobs' presence cannot be cleaved from the nation's identity. Until then, the white mob will always be with us.

Read More About the Attack on the Capitol

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For most of the hundred and fifty-six years since the Civil War, white mobs have had free rein over American society. They burned Black schools during Reconstruction, strung Black bodies from trees during the lynching era, and harassed Black students during the civil-rights movement.

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Mother's Day? Don't make me laugh - Jane Caro

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Mother's Day? Don't make me laugh - Jane Caro

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This satirical piece by Jane Caro discusses the underappreciation given to females, and in particular, mothers. Mothers are not creddited for the work they must endure in order to birth and care for a child. They are less appreciated in society than what men are and are seen as inferrior, but the addition of having to do all the work of holding a child adds to it as well. Being female will always be an aspect of my identity. The quote "We need mother's lives to be understood and taken seriously in a way they never have been for the full 365 days a year", stuck out to me as I feel as though the work, pain, and time is often overlooked and greatly underappreciated that women must go through.

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How regularly it rolls around - the one day of the year when we offer an off-hand, mostly self-interested, sentimentalised 'thank you' to our creators - aka our mothers.

I am on the record (in this very publication, in fact) as a hater of Mother's Day. Not a hater of mothers themselves, of course, being one, but of the absurdity of their so-called special day. Just calling it 'special' is a bit of a wake-up call.

I will never forget the late, great disability activist and comedian Stella Young saying once when someone talked in a smiley voice about people with 'special' needs; "You know what 'special', means, don't you? A little bit shit."

I hate the sickly-sweet, patronising tone we take about mothers around Mother's Day, as if by giving birth to children we have somehow become quasi-children ourselves.

Yet there is nothing sentimental, pretty or fluffy about motherhood. It is a dirty, earthy, messy business from beginning to end; sperm, blood, shit, vernix, meconium, mysterious 'waters', colostrum, breast-milk, mucous, snot, tears, vomit - you name it, mothers either excrete it themselves or must clean it up when excreted by others.

It was Simone de Beauvoir's 'Second Sex' that opened my eyes to the fact that far from venerating mothers, we secretly despise the animal nature of giving birth. The only mother celebrated by Christianity, for example, is a virgin - isolated from messy, beastly (literally) sex. Way to make sure no other actual mother ever felt good about themselves.

Female bodies - particularly when they do what nature designed them to do - and conceive, gestate, birth and feed human young give the lie to the idea that humans are created in the image of the divine.

On the contrary, human reproduction, including sex, reminds us that we are animals, specifically mammals - a kind of brainy ape. We are not special or different. Like every other living creature, we are born, we live, we reproduce, and we die.

Women have borne the burden (if you will excuse the expression) of embodying this annoying and ego-deflating reminder ever since men invented patriarchal religions. Perhaps it is one reason why we have been so universally accorded lesser status by such religious traditions, or as de Beauvoir eloquently expressed it, second place.

Perhaps that is also why there remains such implacable taboos around female reproduction and bodily functions. Why normal activities such as breastfeeding and menstruation still evoke feelings of disgust and a desire to keep them both out of sight and out of mind.

Perhaps it is also why the most unspeakable word in the English language is a word for female genitalia. Why is the word cunt deemed so disgusting? Half the human population have one and the vast majority of us entered the world through one, yet this four-letter word has acquired an almost mystical power to shock.

It is the hypocrisy of it that fuels my resistance to Mother's Day. Just as I think a cheap bottle of perfume (if I hear Cate Blanchett say 'Si' one more time while pulling a face that looks like she's trying not to fart, I will explode), a pair of fluffy slippers or - worst of all - a household gadget is no recompense for the unrelenting work, care and effort of mothering, so I do not believe for a moment that we really respect mothers or the work they do and I don't think we ever have.

Far from it. We take mothers for granted and hardly notice the work they do. We don't pay them for their work and we directly penalise them in the long-term for shouldering the lion's share of caring for others.

We charge them a motza for childcare and structure the tax system to make it uneconomical for them to return to paid work. Despite the fact that women have given birth to every tax payer who has ever lived (as well as being tax payers themselves) we seem to begrudge any expenditure from the public purse which might make their lives easier.

Mother's Day? Don't make me laugh. We need mother's lives to be understood and taken seriously in a way they never have been for the full 365 days a year. Otherwise we will continue to have generation after generation of women - particularly those who have been mothers - becoming the fast growing group among the homeless as they grow old.

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'Mother's Day?' Don't make me laugh: Jane Caro

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How regularly it rolls around - the one day of the year when we offer an off-hand, mostly self-interested, sentimentalised 'thank you' to our creators - aka our mothers. I am on the record (in this very publication, in fact) as a hater of Mother's Day.

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Treat People With Kindness- Harry Styles

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Treat People With Kindness- Harry Styles

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This song expresses my view on how we should treat others. Their is so much hate in our world, due to the emphasis on our differences rather than the appreciation of them. The video also provides the viewer with images of gender role reversal. I like that Harry did not use the stereotypical outfits and dances you would see in the media with a male and female. I am rather passionate about women being viewed as strong, independent, and equals of others. I believe these aspects highlight my identity. This video helps to depict this well and the words of the song is reminder to to simply be kind.

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Harry Styles - Treat People With Kindness (Official Video)

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Harry Styles, himself, is an advocate for many things in our world as well. He is an activist for many different things in our world, but mainly within the LGBTQ+ community. Although I am heterosexual myself, and this provides me with great privelage, I do see the importance of recognizing the opression of the LGBTQ+ community and am proud to suppport a celebrity who appreciates everyone. Lights up is a song that represents the mental helth aspect of my Identity. I interpert this song as a way of describing an internal struggle with mental health. The lyrics "step into the light, so bright sometimes, I'm not ever going back" and "all the lights couldn't put out the dark" sounds as if Harry is describing this struggle. This describes the "mostly stable mental health" that is a part of my identity.

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Billie Eillish, herself, represents many important aspects in our world. She is not the stereotypical female artist. Billie specifically chooses to wear oversized clothing so men, or others, are not given the oppurtunity to sexualize her. The song "My Future" by Billie Eillish is an  important song to me becuase it highlights the aspects of being an independent individual and focusing on your future goals and asperations rather than the love of another person. Being self-reliant is a great part of my identity. The lyric "Im in love with my future, Can't wait to meet her, And I, I'm in love, but not with anybody else, just wanna get to know myself" is what speaks to me the most in this song. I believe this highlights my independent aspect of my identity.