iLL-Literacy

I decided to look up iLL-Literacy after watching that hilarious but very truthful YouTube video about Ethnic Makeup in class. iLL-Literacy is a group made up of poets, emcees, and individuals just like us who have the mission to say something to people who want to listen and send the message out about their views. This group is made up of Ruby Veridiano-Ching, Adriel Luis, Dahlak Brathwaite, and Nico Cary, who all have a say in their own rights. They have toured many places around the world in order to spread their wisdom through many mediums such as singing, rapping, and hip-hop. Wherever they go, iLL-Literacy has made a huge impact on audiences everywhere. Their talent has caught the attention of many broadcast stations such as MTV and poetry television shows.

iLL-Literacy makes lots of videos that can be accessed on YouTube. One such video that I watched is named No Fly Zone- On Being Biracial. In this video, Nico Cary and Adriel Luis perform a social experiment at UC Berkeley and its Asian American student organizations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGXr1Y6YPEo

So the basic idea about the video is that Nico Cary is half black and half Chinese, and he says that his appearance makes him look Filipino to others. He tests out whether or not Asian American student organizations at UC Berkeley will flier him to join Asian American student organizations, since he has never been given a flier once in his five years of attending UC Berkeley. So he sets off to visit the Asian American student organization booths and at the end, he does not get a single flier from an Asian American student organization but only gets fliers from other non-Asian American related organizations. There is a control in the experiment that apparently looks more Asian than Nico who sets off to visit the Asian American student organization booths and at the end, he gets a flier from every single student organization.

This video shows viewers that your appearance plays a large role in what others think of what ethnicity you are. For bi-racials, they are often discriminated because they are of two ethnicities, and yet they look like another ethnicity that is not related to their ethnicities. People do not accept others based on their looks instead of actually getting to know them first. There is no equality since it is the person’s interest to join the student organization, and the idea should not be that they should not be given a flier based on their appearances. I thought that this was very interesting but I knew that it was true. You rarely see people who do not look like the majority of their peers in student organizations, such as a Filipino in a Chinese American group.