1. Cars: Cars are the back bone to the value in Middle Class White Cis Hetero Male American lives.
a.
Book quotation: “Many of us enjoy buying,
owning, and driving our cars, not just because they allow for mobility,
mastery, and are toys to play with, but at a deeper level because we hope the
car will help us live out our values, many of which we share and can identify
as particularly American, distinctive and shaped to the national ways of life.”
(Lutz,15)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: People are attached to their cars
in a way that creates a personal connection. The way we see our cars as an
expression of self is one that is unique to the understanding of car culture. The
car creates a way of the White middle class (usually male) American to express
him self outside of the workplace. This group of people were able to shape them
selves through the promise of the car and car culture.
2.
Cars: Cars are more then life
accessories.
a.
Book quotation “It was assumed that cars would
merely serve as wonderfully useful accessories in the human habitat as it then
was, that they would make the city a better place, and cure all the troubles of
rural life, without altering the arrangement of things in either place.”
(Kunstler, 86)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: This shows that people were using
their emotional brains when buying and using cars instead of their logical
brains. Car culture is about immediate emotional satisfaction instead of the
long term effects (such as the long term environmental effects) that can happen
in affect to urban sprawl, the environment, and the economic long term affects.
Cars actually changed the human habitat instead of staying as mere accessories.
It changed part of culture to be how it is today. We assumed that the addition
of cars wouldn’t alter human interactions/culture, but it did quite the
opposite and was part of the backbone of American culture today.
3.
Cars: Superhighways were counter
productive to innercities.
a.
Book quotation “The superhighways not only
drained them of their few remaining taxpaying residents, but in many cases the new
beltways became physical barriers. Those left behind inside the wall would
develop, in their physical isolation from the suburban economy, a pathological
ghetto culture.” (Kunstler 107)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: Urban sprawl is a huge factor
that increased segregation in urban areas and furthered the creation of
pathological ghetto culture. Superhighways in NYC in the Bronx and upper
Manhattan, are prime examples of cities that cater to cars and then the
neighborhood crumbles under it. Thses areas force people of Color to move into
these areas, affecting their health in the long term, and leads to the further
segregation of cities in terms of race and class. This is why
people are drastically different when urban planning that’s past the
“modernist” age of urban planning. Good cities are made for people, not cars.
4.
Culture: Feminism is affected by car
culture too.
a.
Book quotation “The auto was born in a masculine
manger, and when women sought to claim its power , they invaded a male domain.”
(Seiler, 50)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: The patriarchal view point of the
car was drastically changed during the suffrage movement. Cars were seen as
“freedom” but for White middle class men. When the suffrage movement came,
freedom had to be expanded to include middle class White women. They wanted to
experience the same freedoms in all aspects in their political, social, and not
automobile life. The automobile was limited in these traveling freedoms, but
the suffrage movement helped to expand that freedom to middle class White
women.
5.
Culture: Black drivers don't have the
same freedoms as White divers.
a.
Book quotation “White travelers constructed the
open road as a technological
democracy open to anyone who owned a car, they simultaneously limited access to
automobility through a system of discrimination and representation that
positioned nonwhites outside the new motor culture” (Seiler, 107)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: The automobile was one of the
most powerful building blocks that further separated Blacks and Whites in the
U.S. The automobile lead to White flight and urban sprawl, which left cities in
a terrible place. People of color were forced to live in cities, because the
discrimination that car culture put on them. People of Color, especially those
with less class privilege had an extremely limited mobility, and access to the
car was/is incredibly low. Black folk were systematically excluded from
everything, and car culture is no exception.
6.
Culture: Black drivers were still
oppressed, even on the road.
a.
Book quotation “Whites’ response to Black
drivers generally ranged from merely contemptuous to the lethal... For Black drivers, the road’s only constant
was uncertainty.” (Seiler,115)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: As people who are Black started
to have access to car culture and were able to be mobile, oppression still
followed them where ever they went. Black drivers had the ideals of being able
to have a machine that gave them some amount of freedom since it literally let
them travel. However, Black people were still heavily discriminated against and
targeted by police officers in a huge amount of racial profiling. Although the
car promises freedom, it clearly doesn’t carry through that message all the way
when it comes to giving freedoms to Black people. Car culture intertwined with
systems of oppression, and until those systems of oppression are addressed, car
culture can’t actually provide the fantasy to everyone that is so claims to be
doing.
7.
Media: Buyers are persuaded to get
things they don’t want.
a.
Book quotation: “The buyers are liars… they’ll
tell you this is what I want, and that's what they want… they think, but that’s
not what they’re going to buy. Professionals who help car companies craft their
products images understand this well.” (Lutz, 40)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: Media and dealers are designed to
specifically market a product that isn’t 100% logical to buy. That’s why when
buyers go into dealerships. They leave with a different car then what they had
in mind. This quote illustrates that people are affected by
media/advertisements in a way that they could irrationally buy a car that might
not be the most practical or useful at the end of the day. Professional
advertisers are able to market anything as long as they appeal to the emotional
brain rather than the logical one.
8.
Media: The value of cars is about luxury
and emotion.
a.
Book quotation: (Lutz, 77) “ Dealers have
encouraged Americans to take the value concept beyond the common sense from
which it sprang into the realm of luxury, emotion, and rationalization.”
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: Dealers are the people who bring
the fantasy of cars to the front and center. They create the fantasy that is
full of emotion and luxury and rationalizes that for the viewer’s
entertainment. The viewer, or customer in turn ends up buying a car that isn’t
practical because the dealer hasn’t helped them think it through. But this at
the end of the day is the job of media, to create a fantasy and successful sell
products based off of that.
9.
Media: The car is seen as the home.
a.
Book quotation “The prospective buyer was
encouraged to think of his purchase as a home, with all the powerful associations
the word dredges up from the psyche’s nether regions; the seller was encouraged
to think of it as a house, just as a thing made of wood where the family
happened to sleep and eat, nothing to be attached to.” (Kunstler, 165)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: The idea that the car is like a
home, or is as essential as a home is an incredibly huge feat of the leaps that
media has gone to imbed it self in American media. The car has made it self to
be something that is like a home. You need it, and you want it to be
personalized to who you are and cater to your needs. The car as a home creates
a sort of comfort that media has created over many years of advertisements and
media messages. The car was made to be essential for the middle class White
family, and that was the backbone
of the cars economic growth and audience.
10.
Synthesize: Freedom from oppression must
occur in all parts of society, including in cars, culture, and the media.
a.
Book quotation “Freedom of mind, spirit, and
movement came with my family’s accusation of personal cars. In fact we called
them freedom machines” (125,
Seiler)
b.
Video/Photo:
c.
4-5 sentences: This particular quote is in
reference to African American/Black drivers. Freedom is a huge promise of the
car and car culture. However, car culture/automobility is imbedded with systems
of oppression. Systems of oppression need to be solved and addressed so then
cars can truly be freeing. Freedom of the mind can’t happen with out freedom
from oppression. This is why it’s incredibly important to point out racism,
classism, herto and gender normatively, in car media, because if we stay silent
about it, then we are complicit in oppressive culture. It’s too bad the class
of mostly White students felt so incredibly uncomfortable and defensive every
time I mentioned race. It’s tiring being one of the only student POC voices in
the room that sees oppression in media. But I do my best to get by I suppose.
But at the end of the day, I learned a lot in this course. J
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