Asadullah Bin Amir 

Prof. Shamecca Harris 

05/04/20 

English 

Reading Response #4 

Essay: How Individual Upbringing Affects Young Adult Romantic Relationships

Grade: A- 

Response: After carefully evaluating the essay, I personally believe the essay lacks a perfect structure. Although the author uses multiple credible sources in order to back her claim, the arrangement of these sources lacked structure. Moving past that the essay was an amazing insight about something we all struggle with in this hookup culture. The author highlights that by showing the family contributions. Furthermore every article is backed with an interpretation which solidifies the author’s point. Conclusion is well written, revisits the original thesis while adding more information from the articles. Great piece, the only criticism I have is the structure of the articles used within the essay. 

Asadullah Bin Amir 

Prof. Shamecca Harris 

04/06/20 

English 

Reading Response #2 

The excerpt from “Our Incel Problem” by Zack Beauchamp captures an online community by the name of Incel. At the beginning of the launch of this community it was set to bring people together who were awkward in the subject of dating or life in general. Incel became a platform for individuals to express their problems and to find comfort in advice given from strangers. However, it was soon almost unrecognizable when an incident involving two people. When Two college students were injured, and one ended up dying while about 26 other people were injured. It was later found that the driver was a part of the modern Incel community. The modern Incel community is mainly made up of males, and became very sexist over the few years. The community was unrecognizable from its origin, where the community was very welcoming and open – minded but now existed as a very close minded community full of hatred. The author then moves on to describe how he discovered said online community and describes it as a very hostile place where men have been bashing females for being shallow creatures. As shown in this quote, “ amounting to fundamental rejections of women’s sexual emancipation, labeling women shallow, cruel creatures who will choose only the most attractive men if given the choice”. Due to these patterns and trends, it is quite obvious that Incel as a community is very hostile and dangerous towards women.

Asadullah Bin Amir 

Prof. Shamecca Harris 

English 

Blog Post #4 

03/25/20 

Every human is born into a specific situation, which tends to determine their output on certain life. For example, being born into a rich well settled family you are provided everything that you ask for since you come out the womb therefore the word struggle has no relevance in your life but for someone born into a middle class family, watching your parents struggle daily in order to make ends meet, you tend to have a higher value for smaller things in life. In my case, I can’t say I don’t value things or take things for granted but it would also be wrong of me to say that my parents haven’t provided me with everything I’ve laid my eyes on. In my specific field of research in the NBA community, I feel privilege plays a pivotal role. As the NBA does not discriminate against any minority, it allows everybody to access almost every event, emphasis on every. NBA has a thing called league pass, this allows people who pay for it to access every game that is ever played, but some people can not afford this, I personally have paid for league pass every year since I was 8, therefore I have a better perspective on the community than the ones that aren’t able to watch. I choose the community of basketball, because of my passion for the game. I believe that I have an exponential knowledge in the matter and that makes me an insider and an outsider for the sake of this research. I think the fact that I am an insider may affect my position on this debate. The subjective positions that I drag into this research is favoritism to certain players and an inside perspective on certain matters.

Asadullah Bin Amir 

Prof. Shamecca Harris 

03/23/20 

English 

Reading Response #1

In the essay “Our Patients” by Elise Wu, Wu is trying to portray the factitious subculture. A culture of people who fake their illnesses to receive care and attention. Throughout the essay, Wu is portraying the experience that she personally went through by giving her point of view. Wu stresses the fact that there is an abundance amount of worry when it comes to having the  factitious disorder. She does her best to help the reader visualize the fears of the individual with this specific disorder, one of many is the individual’s fear of being abandoned by their loved ones. Wu goes on to explain that she found herself exaggerating her symptoms in order to get her doctor to trust her and give her the right medication. In order to research this further, Wu researched about the patients, their families, and their doctors. Through her research she found an online community in the form of a visual discussion group for people interested in the disorder. Wu created a verbal portrait by keeping track of the people who posted comments, also she took notes from that. Wu used other sources offline to triangulate the data she gathered from the other Factitious Disorder websites. Throughout all this Wu decided to keep her name a secret because she only wanted to learn about the Factitious Disorder and did not want to expose any of the people who treated her or were there when she was facing the disorder. The footnotes were extremely helpful in Wu’s text because the readers can easily get the idea of what she was talking about instead of searching the things online. Also, it protects the information and gives credibility to the data that were collected. Wu does an amazing job in reflecting on her personal life while sharing with others the severity of the disorder.

As I sit on this couch that could be at most worth 99 cents, I’m beginning to wonder whether I am in the right place to begin concentrating to write on this blog. I reside currently on the 3rd floor of the library at City College of New York. As people walk in and out, I noticed that not one book is missing from these shelves, which leads me to the thought like when we were kids and had to go on that trip to learn how to checkout a book from the library, was that even necessary? We sit in a circular shape, everybody in a different seating position, slowly but surely leaning in to hear into this debate. My friend Demetrius, a skinny 5’7 child. Kanye is his favorite rapper of all time and he made a ballistic claim that Kanye had more classic albums than Drake and that set me off. Resulted in everybody throwing their favorite songs out and the volume of each voice amplifying as the discussion progresses further and further. End of discussion was with me leaning so far up to where I almost fell off, but all in all i won so its ok.

Asadullah Bin Amir 

Prof. Shamecca Harris 

English 

Blog Post #2 

02/26/20 

In the article “ The Hustlers at Scores A modern Robin Hood story: the strippers who stole from (mostly) rich, (usually) disgusting men and gave to, well, themselves.” by Jessica Pressler, serves us two lessons women should look out for themselves, and men are to be manipulated for money. In the first paragraph the author describes why Rosie’s behavior growing up had more to do with her situation rather than herself. Rosie’s parents left her to grow up with her grandparents, parents leaving is one of the most traumatic experiences for a child, I can vouch. Rosie claims her parents are refugees from Cambodia but got caught up in the cultural shock of America. The background information that is provided is crucial to this article because if it was not told, Rosie would be painted as the worst human of all time, but since we are told what her parents did to her that traumatized her, it helps the reader understand the actions taken by Rosie. For example, her parents left to escape to Atlantic City to be involved with all materialistic things. When Rosie realized that she could not obtain those through a 9-5, she began doing what she was doing. She wanted to experience the things that took her parents from her, she wanted to know what could’ve been more valuable to her parents then their own daughter. The author does a fantastic job at creating a live picture within the reader’s mind by using very descriptive language which forces the reader to create an image. For example, the author describes Samantha Barbash, the hustler’s top money maker, as “A single mother from the Bronx, she’d started dancing at 19, and, like an ornamental plant purposefully stunted to conform to a certain ideal”. Using metaphors and the author even uses different well known celebrities to describe her body as shown in the next quote. “ Her body was Jessica Rabbit curvy, her lips Angelina Jolie puffy; her hair, which concealed tattoos of a cascade of stars running down her neck, was Cleopatra black. Buried within this ultrafeminine package was a mercenary streak worthy of Gordon Gekko.”. The author describes the people and the situations through great detail to bring a picture to the readers head. 

In the essay  “A Report from Occupied Territory” by James Baldwin, the author describes the events that take place within Harlem to give context to the intensity of the discrimination that takes place within this territory. The author began by providing details about how African Americans were brutally treated by the law enforcement by giving details of an average male working to begin the essay, then proceeds to show how a simple question from his mouth can lead to him having to watch over his shoulder for the rest of his life. A fieldworker would have to question quite a bit in order to uncover the culture that was described in this article, one of those questions being the following. Are there other instances of similar injustice that took place that weren’t so publicized? Why specifically were those six individuals targeted? Questions such as these would help an individual further uncover the truth about the culture at this time. In order to penetrate the insider perspective, an individual would have to visit these locations through many different perspectives to see the daily activities of these people, this would help the individual further understand the story being portrayed in this essay. James Baldwin does a great job providing one perspective but it is crucial to read other perspectives on this matter. Mr. Baldwin even provides one within this essay, one fieldworker would take the time to understand this article as well.