Advanced Essay #2 Hayley Barci

Hayley Barci                                                                                                                     Oct.26.2016


I remember being bullied, because of the way I looked, the way my body was shaped, I was different. I was always trying to fit in with the the popular kids, with their huge groups of friends.  Meanwhile, I had one true friend, Abby. She meant the world to me. We would always play in the big backyard of her house, and have teddy bears wrapped up in between our arms. I could be whatever I wanted to be around my best friend. I can still remember all of the times we would get in trouble for silly things and how we would play witches in her bedroom, with brooms in between our thighs, flying in the magical skies.

The bullies would always bring me down, I fall, and I would stay on the ground. I would end up home, with my face, showing no emotions of the pain I suffered Every single goddamn day. I would always think of myself as an ugly person, or better yet, a thing. It was as if I were an alien, people poking at me with their sharp tools, drawing pain throughout my veins. An unbearable,  stinging, burning pain, attached to my soul. I would never tell my parents about my troubles. I kept every word inside my tight throat, it was suffocating.

“These stories changed me deeply”, the narrator admits in the beginning of A Place to Stand. I began to open my eyes, and realize that dominance is a way of life in our communities, and in our culture. It’s always the goal to be on a higher standard than everybody else, in different manners. Some nationalities have more knowledge than others, so therefore they use that supply of knowledge in order to gain more power in our nation.

I began to get older as I was starting the realize what I have and didn’t have, I was lucky enough to have all of my needs. I knew I couldn’t get everything thing that I wanted like a milion dollars, or a huge house, or a fancy car. My mother had many struggles with money, pay bills, or insurance, or medical bills. “We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum job or another, which made us middle class by reservation standards,” as claimed in Superman & Me. That’s that situation that certain people have to deal with in our society.    It has always been a heartache watching her struggle, meanwhile some people have all of the money in the world and have a lot of things that we need. The dominance that people of higher class posses is extremely powerful. Using it in order to receive more money from those who don’t really have it.  

This society that many people including myself are exposed to, has impacted the way we live. The amount of money that someone has can be relatable to how much knowledge you have. Sometimes people take advantage of the amount of knowledge they have against others, saying that they have more than someone else. That’s how a lot of people are today, trying to be more dominant than everyone else. That’s  what our society has become, and sadly, that the way it will be.Some people are not known for their knowledge, because others may think that it’s not as informative as their own, or not as important.

Well, after all, “if you want to be American, speak American”, stated in How to Tame a Wild Tongue.That’s often the case when it comes to knowledge, it’s like many people have expectations of you, the way to act, the way you read, write or speak. You are meant to have a higher stand when it come to literacy, and in how you interpret it. How you use the knowledge, and how much impact it will have on others.

These kinds of impacts can be positive for someone who wants more dominance when it comes to literacy and knowledge. For instance, in the United States we have the PSSA’s, PSAT’s, etc in order to measure how much structured learning they obtain. These sorts of situations occur in schools, colleges, jobs, and in multiple different accommodations. Children in many schools get bullied because maybe they don’t understand something in class, or maybe because they learned about literacy at a slower pace.

People of many backgrounds, also receive judgements for what kind of knowledge their families, or ancestors possess. In which can be an issue because you are not exactly your family members, you are not your ancestors, you have a life, and a mind of your own.

In conclusion, our society is built upon dominance when it’s mainly cemented into our culture and how we function this into our everyday lives.

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