In his satirical essay, “The Damned Human Race”, Mark Twain sets off on an uphill battle, to try and convince the entire human race to change its ways. Twain attempts to prove that morality, like any other virtue, has a dark side and this has been the cause of many of man’s problems. In a cynical tone, he uses extensive comparisons posed as experiments to point out the irony in Man’s decision to place themselves at the top of the hierarchy of all living things, based solely on their possession of a moral compass. Twain first utilizes comparisons in the form of experiments to aid his argument about the selfish cruelty of man. In this essay, his first experiment is on greed.
Steven Lawson views Lyndon Johnson as the ‘foremost practitioner of civil rights ever to occupy the White House’ and believes that he was in fact driven to improve the lives and status of Black Americans. However, he argues that his civil rights effort was weakened by both his obsessions with maintaining a ‘middle ground’ and the external factors which contributed to the breakdown of consensus. Lawson claims that Johnson felt that it was his ‘moral obligation [to help] every person of every skin colour’ and that it was the tragic death of Kennedy which enabled him to carry out this. He contradicts the argument laid out by Robert Caro that Johnson’s civil rights interest was influenced by political motives and that he pressured into acting
Pleasantville is a movie about two siblings who find their true colors with the help of others. David and Jennifer fight all the time, and when they fought over the TV remote it broke. Out of nowhere a TV repairman gives them a special remote, allowing them to be teleported into David’s favorite show Pleasantville. Pleasantville takes place in the 50s and is a black and white program. There everyone is happy, life is simple, and there are no conflicts.
INTRODUCTION “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” -Chief Justice Earl Warren Separate But Equal, directed by George Stevens Jr, is an American made-for-television movie that is based on the landmark Brown v. Board of Directors case of the U.S. Supreme court which established that segregation of primary schools based on race, as dictated by the ‘Separate but Equal’ doctrine, was unconstitutional based on the reinterpretation of the 14th amendment and thus, put an end to state-sponsored segregation in the US. Aims and Objectives:
Hidden Figures is an inordinate movie that gives us the lesson that everybody has the potential to do great things if they work hard towards those things. In this movie, an exceptional girl named Katherine is given the chance to go to an extraordinary school so that she can get the education that she needs to fulfill her dream and become an engineer at NASA. The movie showcases the struggles, hard-work, and discrimination that she has to go through while working at NASA. Although some examples of racism are more easily noticeable than others in the movie, all of them show that many Americans did not particularly approve of African-Americans in the mid-1900s.
In the article, “What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct’,” Ta-Nehisi Coates asserts that the idea of race is that “puts hundreds pf millions under domination” (Coates, p. 3). The definition of race is “the classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, ancestry, genetics or social relations, or the relations between them.” Liberals often say “truly stupid things like race has to biological element” (Coates, p. 6). William Z. Ripley wrote a story which desired to “delineate racial difference through head type” (Coates, p. 4). Coates states that “race does not need biology.
Today, many people witness the discrimination against one another, including the discrimination against females; though F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The I.O.U.” in the 1920s, many females relate to the way the men in the story treat the females. Fitzgerald created a story that focused on a publisher who aimed to publish the book “The Aristocracy of the Spirit World” knowing that the book would bring in money. Throughout the story, the publisher’s main goal is to earn as much money as he can; he even goes to such lengths as to make a man disappear for the next ten years. Though his journey to make money, he faces the problem of the character of his book being alive and the story being false. Many readers of this story, focus on the main character and money; however, they overlook the way the publisher discriminates almost all the females mentioned in the story.
In the article The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race the author Jared Diamond explains how the development of agriculture in humanity affected the evolution of our modern society for the worst. He proved this thesis with sufficient points, however, the scientific evidence behind the Luddites’ beliefs are limited. The corroboration behind agricultural advancements being a substantial step for mankind is far more concrete than the opposing side. Livestock and cultivating vegetation was the most significant switch humanity has taken, and molded our world to what it is today. Paleopathologists have recorded that the health statuses of people became critically worse after the Neolithic Period, when civilizations switched to
Racial Equality: A Raisin in the Sun In the 1950’s racial discrimination was a huge factor in the lives of African Americans. Lorraine Hansberry’s book, “A Raisin in the Sun,” helps people imagine the struggles that a standard African American family would have to endure. In the novel, the Younger family has poor housing conditions, badly paying jobs, and have given up hope of ever escaping their circumstances.
“Jane Austen’s Emma became Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, The Wizard of Oz was woven into David Lynch’s film Wild At Heart, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been re-invented into Mel Brooks’s musical stage comedy Young Frankenstein”, and now Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” has been remade into an ad campaign for “No To Racism”. For my project I decided to turn Lorraine Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun” into an ad campaign for the “No To Racism” initiative currently going on worldwide. I think Lorraine Hansberry’s play is extremely powerful and intriguing and I think that it can be just as intriguing as an ad campaign, as well as having the added benefit of being able to reach a larger more global audience.