Any topic (writer’s choice)

Please answer the 4 questions below. You can do so within this document or you can create your own document as long as the question numbers are indicated clearly. Each answer should be approx. 250 words and should demonstrate critical and original thinking. Answers should be well-argued, provide examples when appropriate, and demonstrate understanding of the assigned material. Please cite any sources you use appropriately at the end of each answer. In submitting this assignment, you agree that it represents your own work.
1.    In For Many Latinos, Racial Identity is More Culture than Color, Mireya Navarro points out that the racial categories of the census do not acknowledge the complex and diverse ways in which Latinos self-identify. She explains,
critics of the census questionnaire say the government must move on from racial distinctions based on 18th-century binary thinking and adapt to Americans sense of self But Latino political leaders say the risk in changing the questions could create confusion and lead some Latinos not to mark their ethnicity, shrinking the overall Hispanic numbers. (233)
Do you think it is important for the census to change its racial categories? Why or why not? What are the advantages of changing or not changing these categories? What might updated racial/ethnic categories look like?

2.    In Then Came the War, Yuri Kochiyama provides a powerful first-person account of the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII and her later activism on behalf of redress. She writes,
Most Japanese Americans who worked years and years for redress never thought it would happen the way it did. The papers have been signed, we will be given reparation, and there was an apology from the government. I think the redress movement itself was very good because it was a learning experience for the Japanese people; we could get out into our communities and speak about what happened to us and link it with experiences of other people. (418)
What are the lessons that internment can teach us, particularly in relationship to citizenship? What other experiences (past or present) might internment link to and why?
3.    Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlak in The Ghosts of Stonewall detail a history of the policing of gender in which [g]ender nonconformity is also often punished in and of itself, through physical violence, drawing on a toxic amalgam of queer criminalizing archetypes (273). Do you believe that the US has become more accepting of gender nonconformity since Stonewall? Why or why not? Please provide specific examples in support of your argument.

4.    Chase Strangio discusses how trans-ness made me both hyper-visible and completely invisiblein The Unbearable (In)visibility of Being Trans (460).  How does Strangio explain this paradox? Why and how do the powerful and their power systems surveil and erase trans-ness (460)?