Connection: The Kite Runner and The Color of Friendship

If you've ever met a girl between the ages of 12-18 who owned a TV in 2000, odds are you've at least heard of the movie The Color of Friendship. Yes, it was a Disney Channel made-for-TV movie. Yes, my nerd is showing by blogging about this. and Yes, it is a wonderful movie.
Just to fill in those who HAVE been living under a rock for about a decade, The Color of Friendship was a movie that ran on Disney Channel starting in 2000. In the beginning of the movie, you meet Mahree, a white South African living in apartheid South Africa. She lives in a mansion, with her parents and her housekeeper, a black woman named Flora. Even though she considers Flora to be her best friend, she still holds deep-seeded racism that she has been raised with. Later, she goes to America with the hopes of living with a white family there. The family she does get placed with though, is the Dellums family. Piper, a girl Mahree's age, and her father, Ron, a congressman, were also hoping to get a black South African girl to live with them. Both parties are surprised, and it takes a while for them to warm up, but they go through the traditional Disney storyline of becoming friends and reconciling their differences.
Needless to say, this is a wonderful movie, but how does it connect to The Kite Runner? Well, the relationship of Hassan and Amir is very similar to the relationship of Flora and Mahree. Though she considers Flora her best friend, Mahree still is on the benefitting end of apartheid and is a wholehearted supporter of it. When she moves to America to live iwth the Dellums, she treats them like her servants until she starts to learn that the color of their skin does not automatically make them subservant to her. Hassan and Amir have almost the same relationship. Amir and Hassan might be best friends in someone else's eyes, but to Amir, Hassan is just his servant. It takes finding out that they were half brothers to make Amir see Hassan as an equal, and even then it is begrudgingly. Amir does not go through the Disney Channel happy machine and learn his lesson, but he does move on with his life. In Hassan's letter, it is obvious that Hassan forgave Amir, however undeserving Amir was. This makes it harder for Amir, because he wants to strive to be the person Hassan was in his father's eyes.
Thinking about the similarities between these two relationships makes the relationship in The Kite Runner easier to understand. Seeing how similar the white master, black servant relationship is to the Pashtun master, Hazara servant makes it easier for an American reader to understand. We are so informed about the civil rights fights in America and many people are very informed about Africa, especially apartheid South Africa. Many Americans, however, are far more uninformed about Afghanistan's social issues, and I can confess that I didn't know as much as I should have before reading this book. The relationships between Hassan and Amir and Flora and Mahree make for an interesting comparison between the different racism-powered regimes the world has seen.

Best of Week: Human Nature

In Friday's discussion, we talked about the power that others hold over us. When Assef raped Hassan, his two friends (who disapproved of the act) just stood by and watched. We talked about different studies where, when given a position of power, people will do crazy things to others. Mr. Allen brought up the Stanford Prison Experiment, which I had never heard of before. But when he started explaining it, I realized I had heard of it before. In an episode of Veronica Mars, My Big Fat Greek Rush Week, her boyfriend Logan and best friend Wallace are allowed an opportunity to get out of a 20-page essay for their psych class. Anyone who volunteers for a study and is on the winning team is exempt from it, and the losers only have to write a 10-page essay.

If you watch from 2:10-4:06, you see what happened in the show. The video clip doesn't show it, but in the end of the episode, they show the prisoner who gave away the fake address taking notes for the guard who was especially abusive towards him (Shawn from Boy Meets World), and saying that he's a "pretty good guy." Human nature is such an absurdly complicated topic, and I can't even begin to scratch the surface in one blog post, but I thought that it is such an important topic in Kite Runner that it deserved to be addressed. People's willingness to do wonders when given a position of power (like the experiment Mr. Williams talked about) is amazing, and makes you wonder what you would do when power-crazy. Most people would like to say they would hold true to their morals, but the question I leave you with is: Would you?

Change of Mind: Loyalty

A big theme in The Kite Runner is loyalty. As I read the book, I am amazed at the amount of loyalty (or lack thereof) the characters show. Hassan shows amazing amounts of loyalty towards Amir and his father, even through the roughest of times, while Amir couldn't care less about the boy he had grown up with. Previously, I perceived loyalty as an absolutely necessary character trait. But when I saw where Hassan's loyalty got him, it made me seriously evaluate my feelings. Hassan had unwavering loyalty towards the family who had provided everything for him and his father, and rightly so. But Amir, his supposed best friend, had absolutely no loyalty to Hassan. Amir's only loyalty was to himself (and in a more god-like sense, his father). When he watched his best friend (though he won't admit that they are best friends) get raped, his first instinct was to make sure his kite hadn't been damaged. Amir didn't take a second look when he met up with Hassan after, the only thing he could think of was getting home as fast as possible to show his father the kite that Hassan retrieved for him. Hassan's unwavering loyalty became its worst when Amir hid money and the watch in Hassan's bed to frame him and get his family kicked out. Amir didn't think twice about how they would get by without the steady job that Baba offers them, and he was really surprised when Baba forgave Hassan. Amir thought that Baba and Ali had the same relationship that he and Hassan did, but obviously they didn't. When Hassan left, Amir didn't even shed a tear, but Baba fought tooth and nail to get them to stay. Reading this really made me reevaluate loyalty. Obviously, it's a really important characteristic, because without loyalty you'll never gain anyone's trust. But this specific case shows us that the most innocent of people can be duped by someone claiming to have their best interests at heart. It's hard to think about your friends doing this to you, but it makes you want to think about your relationships with people. You don't just want to assume everyone's out to get you, but you also need to evaluate how you feel about people. The characters in the novel are over-exaggerated to make a point, but they also represent the deepest darkest parts of us, and their desires. To a point, I do identify with Amir, because when I was younger,  I was always the bossy best friend. But his lack of loyalty made me want to be physically ill when I was reading the novel, and it makes me sure to never get even close to that point with anyone.