Chapter 13 Reading Response

Different types of texts provide a well rounded view on certain topics across the entire board. They're usually consisted of first hand accounts and second hand accounts where people are simply recounting what someone else told them about their personal experiences or their observations on a topic. With the topic of minorities in sports and stardom in chapter 13, the ranges of texts fall more into the second category and consist mostly of second hand accounts of what it's like to be a minority celebrity. However, with the "Expect Great" Commercial with Sue Bird, you get someone who actually is a minority in sports (WNBA) telling you that women can be just as good as men at the sport and trying to get people to open their eyes to see that. The rest of the texts do tend to fall into the second category, such as "Doin' Me": From Young, Black, Rich, and Famous. Boyd describes how famous African American athletes act such as Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson and Joe Louis bring styles from their culture into the sport and how people react, but he's not describing his own personal experience, just his observations of famous athletes and his ideas on why they act and dress a certain way. With Say It Ain't So, Big Leagues by Dave Zirin, he talks about how Major League Baseball relies on upcoming talent born and raised in Latin America and how a large portion of the big players today hail from Latin American countries. He describes how the culture in Latin America makes it easy for baseball scouts to tell people they'll become rich and famous if they come and play for a certain team, but yet again, he isn't describing his personal experiences. He is merely writing about his observations on the relationship between Latin American players and Major League Baseball. So, both types of sources (first hand and second hand) help develop different perspectives on certain topics by giving the reader a specific side of the story that the author wants to present. That's why you have to evaluate the level of bias in a text when reading it to determine if it is really credible or not to use to try and back up an idea, because people can skew things so far to fit their purpose that it may end up giving you false information and making your argument suffer inevitably.