Response to readings for 27 July

I guess some of the most obvious similarities were the emotions that the girls experienced because of the way they were treated for being "different." They were both scared, confused, and angry. They were also both bent on success, or it seemed that way. Like because they were treated as inferiors, they had to prove themselves. This was interesting to me because I think it's much more often the case that being treated as inferior makes people believe that they are inferior. In another one of my classes, we read a couple of books about kids from "bad" neighborhoods who were more than intellectually capable of going to college and/or getting decent jobs, but who didn't believe they had the ability because they were always told that they didn't. One of the differences that I think is important is that the Indian girl is of "pure blood" and comes from a family that is 100% ethnically the same as she is. Her mother has an idea of what she should do, which is return to her family, but she chooses not to, which results in her being rejected by her mother. Sui, on the other hand, doesn't have a real home in the first place. She is torn between two homelands, her mother's and her father's, neither of which she considers her own. Her parents seem to provide little guidance as to how she should feel about her nationality or what she should do because of it. Unlike Zitkala, she doesn't even have a starting point against which she could rebel. I think the differences between the two girls and the people around them were different too. Zitkala was one of a number of Indians, who stood in stark contrast to the missionaries around them. The differences between her and her surroundings were very pronounced. Sui, though, was mistaken for white, Japanese, and Spanish or Mexican in San Francisco. She didn't fit in, really, with anyone. I guess that's what leads up to her statement at the end about valuing the individual.