What a week! To divert but not break the chain of celebratory talk, I'd like to announce that my IB Art CWB is completely done (no more IB internals!!!) and my exhibition is ready to go up the day I get back from spring break. TASPer attendance would be nice... *hint*

However - although I'm not directly affected by this - our very difficult-to-understand superintendent suddenly recommended that works one "wouldn't want a six-year old elementary school student to see" be excluded from the exhibition. Considering many IB students work - for two years - with themes that are controversial by nature, this announcement came as a surprise to us. We sort of rushed through the 'Creativity and Politics' week at TASP, but I thought the issue was relevant. What do you think? Given that our exhibitions will be on school property, and will be open in a space theoretically shared by the entire kindergarten-to-grade-12 school, can the superintendent validly censor the IB Year 2 exhibit?

I know I just raised a new question when there are so many questions hanging open. So, because I have no sense of direction, I'd just like to start by saying the insights shared over the past two weeks or so were very, very thought provoking. I suppose it's a bit late now to try and remember everything I did think about, but now that neuroscience has been brought up, I thought this study (Yale 2000; detecting racism using brain imaging techniques) mentioned in this article (scroll down to the 5th and 6th paragraphs - this was the best I could do, sorry) was worth looking at.

To pitch in my opinion to Alex's question on how much race contributes to identity, I think race (skin pigmentation) does set some basic parameters to the first impressions a person may give off, but the way those impressions are revised deal more with culture than race itself. As we grow older and develop more grounded philosophies, the culture that influences you through, say, your parents, really begins to come out - and that's how the race you share with your parents correlates to (doesn't directly influence) parts of the culture you begin to share with them as well.

Adrian brought up hybrid kids in his last post, and I think they're a particularly interesting case to consider in our race-identity question. What I noticed in our school was that, when someone is a hybrid of two races, the culture he identifies with is the one that correlates to the more 'dominant' of the two cultures. Dominant in the sense that the culture itself is more highly valued than the other - 'American' culture, for example, because, believe it or not, it's taken over the world when it's not even clear what American culture exactly is. To cite a weak example to illustrate what I'm trying to get at, a British-Filipino classmate of mine speaks with a bit of a British accent even though he's never actually lived in the UK, an Irish-Indonesian girl in my English class hangs out with the European kids, and, so on. And I don't think the value attributed to individual cultures has that much to do with politics, because if you look at the way the kids in our schools segregate themselves - the Chinese and the Taiwanese are one solid group, and if you mention Kashmir to the inseperable Pakistanis and Indians in the South Asian group they give you a cold look and tell you it's complicated.

Anyway. Obviously, I've been talking too much. Brian, I thought there was so much to each character (I personally could relate so strongly to Franz and Tereza) in Unbearable Lightness, so I was somewhat surprised you didn't like the characterization. But I have to go and burn the copies I've kept of my college apps, now that they're done losing my forms.

posted by Tae-Yeoun Keum   [7:05 AM]

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