Yongho Kim

Category: class notes

  • movements, notes. capitalism

    class notes. jan 31. freedom movements

    fr nights, Golden town

    Mapantsula
    visual imagery
    thrown out of the window
    Themba
    “John” speaking Afrikaans
    english had subtitles (also aimed at non-english speaking native audience)
    1976 Soweto’s school students boycott Afrikaans language

    Afrikaans develops not to be understood by masters? but why don’t they speak it then?

    violence / peaceful resolution

    Duck
    1. lower middle class
    2. tails cat the N

    Manning Marable: Race is the modality through which class is expressed.

    Nothing but a man – filmmakers are white
    violence: Tactially to attract (white) sympathy

    every slave had to be zambo =//= need to be tamed?
    Lily: nothing but a man “north” as a safe place
    Pathe: Film noir detective, anti hero (Rosenberg?)
    Priest
    Social history -> women making “stuff” possible
    movement history

    (leola Johnson) extradiotigenic personality
    on Abby Lincoln 1963

    Jesse Goldman on Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/linking-racism-and-capitalism-robinson.html
    -Theoretical background: racism & capitalism -> formation of europe
    racism predates capitalism -> influences
    immigratory movements in Africa care about work places of works
    going to another place slavs as natural slaves
    capitalism comes from a social order (racism)
    capitalis is a process of “heteroginization”

    Zach Cheema on Harold Wolpe
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/harold-wolpe-capitalism-and-cheap.html
    (P: racial and labor control in tension)
    white domination
    1. capitalist -less pay >>>> anti-capitalis (less efficiency)
    2. af-am / blacks in SA
    af-am considered inferior
    sa considered equals
    Wolpe is fixating in making Apartheid separate from segregation
    strategies to create breaches among black/white workers

    Jonathan Fredor
    Cooper. black ideology
    songs of Zion Tiembo
    (P: Cooper doesn’t like Frederickson)
    doesn’t walk much about U.S.
    criticizes on mechanical comparison, too much white perspective (no black agency)
    interested in how religions and ideology works

    Shula Marks
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/white-supremacy-review-shula-marks.html
    -highest agers of white supremacy, John S.
    marks is SA historian
    doesn’t like comparative historical method
    generalizing is bad
    not enough info
    George Frederickson had historical inaccuracies

    Peter: comparative history is only done through a U.S. lens, and when you look at Safundi for example, more broad comparisons (brasil, etc) is done

    I brought up racism and racialism from Anthony Appiah, and said Robinson is opposed to Frederickson.

    group discussion
    (what makes a slave) christians are enslaved too, white slaves
    1900-1942
    rights in he americas
    colored in SA, frederickson p.133

    Alessandra Williams on Manning Marable
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/how-capitalism-underdeveloped-black.html
    phenotype condition
    black migration
    common worldview was destroyed
    white working class gave up
    George Lukacs -> racism
    whitenes -> took hold off of whiteness
    (P: prof of Af-Am in Columbia)

    Leonard Thompson -> good overview
    freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/thompson-history-of-south-africa.html

    • segregation of homelands

    -blacks created their own economic world, niches
    -ANC formation

    Marable & Homeland LEadership

    Lily on Phil Bonner
    http://freedommovements.blogspot.com/2005/02/bonner-delius-posel-shaping-of.html
    Apartheid’s genesis in the 20th C
    processes of social history
    (district 6 was bulldozed after 1946)

    peter: per books, demographic (b/w in sa/am)
    smilarities

    A. Randolph: WWII as a war on racism, going to DC asking for equal jobs
    no jobs! poor jobs

    SA there are jobs, no political power
    structures & mandela/king

  • Class Notes. movements. Introduction

    class notes, Freedom Movements
    January 24, 2005

    -SNVC (?)

    • we are reading M.L.King and N.Mandela, not because they are everything that their respective movements represented, but in order to get an initial idea of what the main body of texts “representative” in public discourse of the movements is about. That way it is possible to at least talk about some”thing” when directing criticism.
    • David Garrow legal research historian.
    • Anthony Marx. political scientist trained in Amherst
    • Clay Carson. SNIC. Curator of MLK in Struggle

    Meyekiso
    Krog TRC
    Churchill

    Frederickson: watch for structures & ideologies

    Screening of Mapantsula
    What makes black film?

    • Spike Lee argues the screenwriter, director, actors, need to be black, etc, etc
    • Mapantsula differs

    Added today: I still don’t get the difference.
    -bg: 1985 state of emergency in SA. the figure of totsi (another word for mapantsula, or the young gangster)

    • rapid urbanization after ww2. large scale forced migration of a male workforce. black worker towns. prime example: Soweto.

    -hustler, mapantsula outside the cities or the SA version of “ghettoes”
    -regarding the social formation of totsis: greater exposure to american-led mass culture -> the big trend of the times was the detectivesque film noir -> young people identify with it to express their anger
    -what goes on today is a different matter, where young people of color have started killing other people of color. some social scientists trace the roots back to the 1950’s totsis, whereas the two phenomena deserve differential treatment.
    -theoretical framework: infrapolitics. (Will Seidt, Weapons of the Weak – studies resistance in the Phillippines)

    • McDonalds, gangster realities of the 90’s: TUPAC, Dona Carey New York [I don’t get this reference] – role in american icons.
    • makers of mapantsula told distributors that they were maknig “just another gangsta movie”. when the movie was released, it was banned in south africa.

    Mapantsula notes
    knowledge -> black body

    on the syllabus
    “do the right thing” <- smiley character? malcolm & king not as opposites. instead nothing but a man. Mapantsula was filmed in 1988

  • Personality Assessment Assignment

    Yong Ho Kim, April 29th 2003

    1. What are some criticisms of trait theory in general?

    Possible criticisms include that subjects can falsify answers because the result of a personality test can be personally important to them, that very often the questions are culture-specific, and that subjects across different cultures don’t necessarily present the same main personality traits (Kalat points out that in the Chinese there is only an “loyalty to Chinese traditions” trait instead of “agreeableness” and “openness to experience”. This could be interpreted as meaning that in China a high agreeableness (being loyal to other people who follow the Chinese tradition) and being closed to experience (not trying other non-Chinese things) have always correlated together and could be lumped into one category.)

    It turns out that given personality tests chunk groups of people together, it will forego other less prominent differences in personality, considered by the creators of the big five as overlapping or unimportant. However, ignoring small individual differences can directly lead to stereotyping, which isn’t always a desirable result. Of course, there is the payoff that the more traits we add and intend to measure through tests, the less parsimonious the test becomes. It is possible to do the reverse and decrease the number of traits even further arguing that they still overlap (Eysenck), even though it might generalize the descriptions even more.

    2. Evaluate your lab section’s choice of traits.

    Overall it was a good sample, but “experimental” and “curious” seemed to overlap in meaning. To experiment, one needs to be curious. For “motivated” and “diligent”, it seems like one corresponds to a mental disposition while the other is a behavior. Isn’t it the case that being motivated will lead the person to work harder, thus being perceived by others as diligent?

    Also, “social” and “shy” were two degrees of the single trait. Hence, we would be using more titles than necessary, and making the accuracy of the test lower. Overall, it was about a good number of traits.

    3. Evaluate your lab section’s choice of questions to evaluate those traits.
    Questions such as “during the past week, I cried more than twice” were aimed at too narrow audiences to make any sense out of the results. No male subjects responded yes to that question, but it is possible that if the frequency had been reduced to once per month the number of respondents had been over zero (still including those who cry twice), and make a conclusion out of it, since a result of zero doesn’t tell us what the lower limit is.

    4. What are some of the difficulties associated with developing personality questionnaires?

    The problem lies in the fact that the questionnaires have to be created with human subjects in mind. If the test is too long, it will discourage subjects from finishing or volunteering to work on the test. But the more questions the questionnaire carries, the higher accuracy can be expected from it.

    5. What are some of the difficulties associated with administering personality questionnaires?

    Especially if subjects are acquaintances of the experimenter, they might hide those qualities deemed undesirable and emphasize those desirable. Also, often the pattern of answers subjects give is highly dependent on the social and emotional context in which the subject was situated at during the specific time and place of the day at which the subject took the questionnaire. Also, it is a written test, so people must sit down or at least stand still, which excludes an important population of Macalester College who are often running from class to class. (This is not a implicit reference to the “running boy”.)

    6. How could personality evaluation be improved?

    It is necessary to hide the “socially unacceptable behavior” tag from the questions as much as possible, in order to prevent social hindrance at the moment of responding questionnaires. Detaching the questions of positive remarks is also important, the idea being that questions should sound rather neutral. This has been done for the current test, but still “People I don’t know make me nervous” carries a strong negative implication that should be corrected. (I suggest, “I am mostly friendly towards people I know”). The conclusion seems to be that this is a embedded problem for self-administered tests.

    Also, the format of the question could be changed so that it could, for example, be read off a tv screen or heard from a cassette recorder. Or done orally individually. If this were to be done, it would increase the repertoire of subjects to be included in the pool.

    On a final note, I thought the effectiveness of personality tests could be improved if subjects didn’t realize that it was a personality test that they were taking at the moment of taking them, (so that they can be less conscientious and less censoring while answering questions) but this seems impossible given the access college students have to Psychology courses.