“Holler if you hear me!”
In my Foundations of American Education class, the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students, Greg Michie, came to speak to my classmates and I about his experiences as a teacher in the predominately Mexican-American South Side of Chicago. While speaking, he recommended we watch two videos.
The first is titled “A Girl Like Me,” and it focuses on how African American girls grapple with the concept of beauty as defined by American society. The second clip, which is titled “Nice White Lady,” is much more humorous. It is a Mad TV spoof of the stereotypical film genre, where an outside teacher comes to an inner-city school and saves his or her students from a life of poverty and crime.
I think both clips, in spite of their stylistic differences, make an equally profound point concerning how minorities and urban society are perceived in American society. There is something fundamentally wrong with how we treat and represent our often marginalized minority population, and hopefully these two clips help to spell that out for you.