Tuesday, August 4, 2009

"You racist?" "Nawh, I just like white people better"

Recently I did a 10 minute transcription. What that means is that the integrated viral DNA is transcribed by the host cell's RNA polymerase.

No it doesn't.

I guess the name is kind of misleading. 10 minute transcription actually means watching and rewatching 10 minutes of the same youtube video in order to turn spoken words into written words. It took me about 8~9 go throughs to finish, therefore taking up a good chunk of about 1.5 hours. The topic was on responding to hate speeches on the internet.

The orator, Matt, was a very eloquent guy; post-BA in journalism, pre-MA in the same thing. He brings up points that, like the whole of sociology, seem really obvious once you hear/read it, but before that you would almost never come up with that. Some of my highlights were the argument against minority arguments (aka don't ever say "Don't make fun of her being muslim, when you are a black woman" which leads to the argument that would it be more acceptable if a white male was to make fun of "her"), the difference between regular bible citation and hate speech ("the bible says homosexuality is a sin" vs "the bible says homosexuals are filthy perverts", which both seems like hate speech to me, but I can start seeing the difference), and how he pronounced rhetoric (think limerick).

Obviously by using everyone's own looking glass self, it is easy to want to skew what Matt has said in ways that jive with our own believes. What did I get out of it? It's okay if I'm racist, as long as I treat all minorities as equals (or as Matt puts it, "gives them a fair shake"). Of course I took deeper meanings out of that speech, hence me spending 1.5 hours to transcribe it.

That and it might be because it's a White guy saying it.

4 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Whoops, wrote that wrong.

Rhetoric is pronounced "RET-oh-rick".

Justin Chang said...

Which is why I didn't say "he wrongly pronounced".

Anonymous said...

listen to the white guy! lawl