Class Reflection

We’ve had a lot of great guest lecturers this semester, but I found the lecture given Kristin Kopp to be the most interesting. Professor Kopp gave the lecture of the history of African Americans in Germany. I found it to be the most interesting and the most informative because, for some reason, I had never considered how black soldiers and their families were received in Europe during a time where they were facing overt systemic racism here in the United States.

Europe and the United States both share histories of racial/ethnic injustices (that continue on to this day with the treatment of Muslims), but from what Professor Kopp presented, after World War 2 it seemed that people in Europe were a bit warmer towards African Americans than people in America were.

I also loved the short film that Professor Kopp showed us, because it did a really good job at symbolizing the shift in attitudes towards Afro-Germans and other racial/ethnic minorities in Germany. I think that the rhetoric that the old woman in the film used helped drive home that anti-blackness or racism is a global phenomenon- it is not contained to America, which is an important distinction to make at this point in time, where globally America is being ousted for its systemic biases against racial and ethnic minorities while other white supremacist countries (whose hands are far from clean historically and in the present) wag their fingers at “our” problems (as if America didn’t learn its ways from European countries).

I think the most prominent insight that I gained researching Italy this semester was that Italy is also suffering from problems that everyone is suffering from, but the problems in Italy are hardly ever addressed or used as an example of our crumbling, capitalistic, global society.

For example, this semester I learned that Italy- Central and Southern to be more specific- is suffering from mob corruption. In American media, we use their mob corruption as a running gag, but it’s a legitimate problem in Italy that we hardly ever consider. The economic struggles on Italy are akin to the struggles in a lot of Southern and Eastern European countries, and instead of treating it as we’ve treated the crisis in Greece, for example, we’ve pretty much ignored it. America isn’t the only country ignoring the problems in Italy; the European Union has also turned a blind eye to most of the problems there.

I also learned a lot about the refugee crisis through studying Italy this semester. The amount of refugees that have come through Italy seeking asylum in Europe has made the problem so big in Italy that there are multiple articles every day dedicated to it. So, while my region didn’t specifically dictate that I must address the crisis, the impact that the crisis has had on Italy has meant that I’ve had to keep a closer eye on it than maybe someone who studied The Americas or even someone who studied Northern European Countries until the incident that caused the crisis to reach a global scale.

Overall, this semester- between the guest lecturers and the extensive research about the impacts of globalization- was very informative and inspiring.