11/30/17

     Today in class we went through our usual opening and did our usual good morning. We talked about perception and bias. We talked about how Nick's bias is sometimes subconscious, which is where Fitzgerald can pit the gaps that we see in his passage. We talked about how Nick feels about black people and we discussed how Nick thought about them. He uses words like Buck, and Negro which shows that Nick doesn't view them in a good way. The same way about Jewish people. He points out stereotypical attributes about the Jewish man Wolfshiem in the book by criticizing his nose, eyes, etc. This lead to finding out Nick's background which is WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). They're at the top of the USA, only one president wasn't a WASP. He can discriminate against anything that isn't him. In the book Fitzgerald misspelled words like connection and Oxford, saying connegtion and oggsford to show that Nick is making fun of the accent of the Jewish male. He uses language to create barriers between him and 'others'.
     This thing called bias is apparent in almost everything we read. Some historians have bias, and people who have had and made documents in the past have also had bias. Their perception on things is different then how we have seen it in the U.S. Also we as individuals view and see things differently then the person next to us, so we see difference in stories and these gaps in truth that we tend to see when multiple people tell stories about the same thing hence a framing narrative. One person will tell a story to another and that person will tell the same story but add how the story was told to him changing it slightly. An example of this was when you guys went silent for about 5 min. Everyone was permitted to write the truth however, there was different truths and gaps between each story. However the same thing everyone mentioned was the unusual silence that enveloped the classroom.