Spring 2016: The Peopling of New York City A Macaulay Honors Seminar taught by Prof. Karen Williams at Brooklyn College

Spring 2016: The Peopling of New York City
Analysis of BeMore’s website

Daniel Cohen

Discussion Blog Post #3

Browsing the BeMore website, I immediately admired their purpose, which seems to be to eliminate the social construct of race. However, the key claim of their “Vision2040” campaign trailer, that there won’t be a racial majority by 2040, seems a bit odd. I find that human attempts to predict how society will change in the future tend to fail. For example, in the 19th century no-one believed that Japan would modernize, but all it took was one emperor, Meiji, to utterly disprove their beliefs. What makes it any more likely that BeMore’s prediction will turn out correct?

Furthermore, the site does not provide much information on the Vision2040 campaign. No direct sources are given for the figures they post, which seems rather suspicious and more than a little dishonest. Also, I was unable to find further information on Vision2040 in the few links they provided. In fact, it is hard to say what the point of Vision2040 even is, as the campaign trailer was incredibly vague.

The other external content they posted, however, were intriguing. While one video was simply a black screen, the other, a series of interviews with 12-year-old Americans of various ethnicities on their opinions about race, how they are perceived by their peers, and their thoughts on white privilege. Their responses were eye-opening. For some odd reason, the one about classmates being disgusted by one’s cultural food stuck out to me the most. I find it hypocritical (and therefore funny) how people can be disgusted by foreign foods, but eat foods like ground-up pig intestine on a bun (AKA hot dogs) without batting an eye. But I suppose misinformation and a judging mentality are the root of all discrimination, aren’t they? There were also several articles posted to their Facebook page that I didn’t bother to read, but that looked mighty interesting.

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