RANDOM THOUGHTS

Posts Tagged ‘Society’

Everybody isn’t meant to be a parent

In Uncategorized on December 15, 2009 at 9:54 pm
One day I was going to the store and I saw a young woman with two children. One child was in a stroller and there was a little girl, about 4, standing next to her. The child asked for some chips, or some type of snack and whined a bit like any normal child would do. The saying “a kid in a candy shop” exists for a reason. The little girl was not being really bad or loud but her mother yanked the girls arm so hard and dragged her out of the store while muttering some type of expletive to the child. I could not believe my eyes. It was not as if she pulled the infamous tantrum and threw herself on the floor, kicking and screaming. She was calm, just the usual plea of a child who wants sugar. Another lady and myself simply looked at each other and then she said “some people simply are not meant to be parents” I am pro-choice by nature. But incidents like these make me wish there was more information and resources, not necessarily for abortion, but just about parenting in general, whether it was adoption info, abortion info, birth control info or parenting counseling. There needs to be more resources in inner-city communities to help young woman adapt to parenting or opt-out of parenting. Supposedly teenage pregnancies have dropped but the incidents of unprepared/faulty parenting have not. These are issues that need to be severely addressed.

There is something troubling about this…

In Uncategorized on December 15, 2009 at 9:53 pm
I think that there is definitely something troubling about calling the interbreeding of African bees with European honey bees as “africanizing”. Here’s the article

The terminology we use to describe things in my opinion really shows underlying biases, and feelings about issues. Now if these bees were from Brazil I would hardly think we’d call it “Brazilianizing” We may perhaps say Brazilian bees, but that would probably be the most as far as technical terms are concerned. What further confirmed my opinions about the underlying bias was the fact that these African bees are associated with overaggressive behavior, kind of the same way Black people are.

Although Africanized bees look like European honey bees, they tend to get irritated faster, respond with more firepower and stay mad longer than other bees, said Kirk Visscher, a professor at the University of California at Riverside, who has studied Africanized bees since 1985.

Their stings aren’t more powerful than other bees but they are more aggressive and swarm more often.

It’s kind of the concept that once you’re Black we have to contain you. Further in the article, they did note that all the existing hives have now been destroyed. I guess I am being a little extreme here. Although I am not denying the need or the seriousness of these bees I just think referring to them as Africanized is problematic. Am I alone on this one?

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