Brittany Liu's Blog #10 Thanks For a Sexy and Racy Time

It's hard to sum up this class in one sitting.  Sexy Racy is very dense, context wise and it covers such a broad range of topics.  I think if I write this blog my senior year I will have something completely different to say because the knowledge I have gained from this class now will expand and connect throughout the rest of my academic career.  I'm so glad that I was able to take this course as a freshman.  In high school this is what I had hoped college classes would be like, but I didn't think it was accurate.  This course really opened me up to so many academic possibilities.  As a freshman I have never been that comfortable sharing my personal opinions on certain topics and this class taught me to feel confident in what I believe.  This is all because of the supportive environment our professor and our entire class has created.  We are such a diverse class full of different races and ages, which created so many unique perspectives.  I not only learned so much from the material we studied and from our professor, but also from my fellow classmates who made up our community.

This course specifically was able to make connections to material in my other classes.  After we talked about third cinema I had an assignment to read a film article called "Towards Third Cinema" in my World Cinema Before TV course.  In my World Cinema class we really learned about that style/technique of film and its origins, which complemented our emphasis on the culture and context of third cinema in Black Girl.  This class also taught me how to look at film in a new light.  Someone was giving a presentation on a Spike Lee film in my World Cinema class and talked about the lighting difference between dark skinned and light skinned people.  It is much easier to shoot silhouettes of black people versus white people.  The techniques brought up in the presentation really made me think about what kind of message film conveys to the audience about race and how it differs from other mediums.  I'm very passionate about theatre and film and I have taken classes based on technique, but this course really showed me how much these art forms can express about humanity and our world.

One of my favorite parts of this class was when we all grouped ourselves by race, but then we found our bridges and connected ourselves into one big circle.  I think that was the moment we became a community.  It taught me to stop ignoring race and embrace it!  When we did project three I learned how difficult it is to be a teacher!  I may understand everything in my own brain, but how to you convey that to students effectively and in a way that also stimulates questioning?  I love the idea of always formulating new questions because learning is infinite.  One of my favorite quotes is by William Butler Yeats, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."  I wish I could take this class again because I feel I could get so much more out of it now that I truly understand the scope of the course and what it has to offer.  Thanks to Professor Aguas and our Sexy Racy community, this class has taught me how to think, expand, and connect.