More Tokenism

The past few weeks in class, we have talked a lot about tokenism in television. Tokenism is the inserting of minority characters in an attempt to create diversity. At the end of friday's class period, I was told the only homework is to think about the world critically while on break. So, I decided to look for tokenism while outside of school.

Being Jewish, during Christmas break there are many times when my friends are celebrating the holiday with their family. During these times, I watch movies. So far this break, I have seen three movies. Elysium, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, and This is the End. While watching all three of these films, I found perfect examples of the different kinds Tokenism we examined in class.

During Elysium, a movie staring Matt Damon in which he is given special strength and assigned to save the world, token characters are most defiantly present. First off, Damon's best bud Julio is hispanic. Julio serves as a "Buddy Character". This is a character that is an under-developed minority due to the lack of screen-time. While Matt's character has many flashbacks to his childhood, Julio's past remains a mystery to the viewers. During these flashbacks, Matt's character becomes complicated, and these flashbacks stir up moral conflict, therefore complicating his character. Julio however, remains a "2-dimensional" character.  Not only does the movie have a buddy character, it also incorporates an "Authority Minority". This token character is the president of the affluent community, and makes no rash decisions. President Patel is a level-headed minority in a position of power making him the "Authority-Minority" of the film.

The second movie I watched was Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters. Although I felt this movie was awful, I was interested in the tokenism present during the film. A buddy character is present: a black, half goat half human, best friend of the main, white character Percy Jackson. This was a pretty basic character, not very exciting. The token character that did interest me was the character Tyson: a Cyclops. Tyson also served as a token character, and joined the LONG list of token characters in entertainment to die heroically. Tyson leaps in front of a flying arrow to save Percy, and then falls off a cliff. As we discussed in class, Token characters almost always have heroic deaths, whether or not it fits their personality up to that point.

The last movie I saw this Christmas was This is the End. For the third time. This time, I was able to look at it critically, and saw the movie in a different light. The movie is about 6 famous actors playing themselves while surviving the apocalypse. There are 5 white men, and a black man. The black guy, Craig Robinson, serves as this movies token character. All of the 5 white men have had major roles in many over-lapping films, are are very used to working together. Craig on the other hand, is featured in only one of these films, and plays the body guard to one of the white men. Like the majority of  token characters to come before him, he dies a heroic death, distracting a monster so three of the white men can live.

I'm sure I will continue to watch movies as most of my friends are out of town, and now I know what I'll be looking for in the rest of the movies. Tokenism is present in all aspect of American Media, is very easy to see once you know what to look for.

Oreo=American

While off on the usual 20-minute random tangent my math-class takes, vital information about my math teacher's life was discovered. Turns out my forty-some year-old math teacher has NEVER tried chocolate in his life. My reaction to this was: "Wow, he has incredible self-control. Good for him." My classmates however, did not have the same reaction.


People began to shout at him, asking whether or not he's ever had a brownie, or hot chocolate, or a chocolate chip cookie. He calmly responded to all the chaos by admitting he's never had any of the aforementioned desserts. I thought that would be the end of the discussion. I was wrong. Ben, my seat neighbor who is also in the American Studies class, was the only other one near me who was not intrigued with this newfound fact.


Questions flooded in for the next 10 minutes, with people refusing to believe this seemingly impossible lifestyle existed. One of the senior girls in the front row then proclaimed that "never eating an Oreo is un-American". I guess I was not aware that abstaining from eating 160 calories worth of flour, sugar, cocoa, and corn syrup was "Un-American".

"Un-American" is defined as deviating from American values. This, by the transitive property means that eating unhealthy junk food is an American value. It is sad that being unhealthy has become such a staple in American culture that it is considered an American value. Maybe this is the cause for the 35.7% of American adults that are considered obese according to http://www.cdc.gov. Is it possible that these rates are so high not because people have low self-control, but it has become an American value to eat un-healthily?

Hour of Fun

While procrastinating writing a new blog post, I found an incredible website that one of my Facebook friends had shared. The website is "Hour of Code" and can be found here. Hour of Code is a fun and easy way to teach children the basics of writing computer code. The website is genius. It takes well-known children's characters, such as the Angry Bird and the zombie from Plants vs Zombies to immediately grab the attention of children. Once the Hour of Code has started, videos from famous people such as Bill Gates and Chris Bosh hook the viewer in even more. The purpose of the site is to teach children the basics of computer code by leading recognizable characters through mazes. It is absolutely incredible to think that what used to be an advanced skill only offered in college is now being taught to small children just a few years late. One completes the maze by moving blocks depicting words such as "Move Forward" or "Turn Left" is the correct order so the character can complete the level. My immediate thought is this isn't basic computer science, this is a children's game. But I was WRONG. Between every two or three levels is one of the famous people teaching you about real-world programing applications that are connected to the little blocks. For example, one of the blocks says "Repeat" and all the smaller boxes inside of that box, continue to repeat until the maze is finished. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, tells the viewer that the repeat box is similar to the coding used on Facebook to send out millions of "Happy Birthdays" each day. To the left of the blocks are lines of actual code that each box correlates to. When you put these boxes together and complete the maze, code is written. The boxes get more and more complicated as the game goes on, and after the 20 levels, your Hour of Code is complete. The site then offers more easy ways to learn code. What a genius way to create interest in a field that only continues to grow as people rely more and more on technology: target the youth. Almost 300 million lines of code have been written by students already. The ages listed on the website are ages 6-106, sos if you fall into this age range, you should be okay to try. If you are interested in coding at all, or you love Angry Birds, go check out this nifty website!

21st Century Executions

During my ninth period class, Social Service Board, my peer made a current event presentation on a very disturbing news article. He shared with us an article reporting on the public execution of 80+ people in North Korea. In cities such as Wonsan and Chongjin, people were put to death for minor offenses such as owning a bible and watching South Korean movies while about 10,000 people were forced to watch. The scariest part of this whole endeavor was that my friend who shared the article said it was a very difficult article to find. It made no headlines, and many major news networks such as CNN did not report anything about it. How could such a major story not be ALL over the news? If the execution took place in New York, it would be the headline of every newspaper all over the world.

 I believe the article was so under-reported because if the U.S news released this story and claimed it to be an act of terrorism against North Korea's own people, there would be a huge push by the people to send troops to help these poor civilians. The last thing America needs is to instigate another war after just ending the longest war in American history. On the other hand, if injustice is present in our world, shouldn't the rest of the world, as fellow human beings, do everything possible to ensure justice?

This argument becomes the never-ending argument: Is the U.S the world's police? Since the U.S spends more money on it's military than the rest of the world does combined, should we be the second line of defense for every country? (Mr. Bolos's presentation) How can we sit back while horrible things like this happen to innocent people? These are all questions to think about while reading these horrific executions to inevitably come in the future.