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Essay On DW Griffith's Birth Of A Nation

504 Words3 Pages

To beat around the bush: Yes, I believe that DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation deserves to be covered in a 2017 film class setting. However, there are two main topics that encompass my full opinion on the matter.
My first reasoning stems from the concept that if history classes are expected to remove any and all material that could be considered ‘problematic’ or ‘controversial’, there would not be anything left to teach. Therefore, why should we learn about history if history itself is one big controversy? For me, a quote from George Santayana answers this: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (Santayana). Simply removing a concept from learning material does not remove the concept from the surrounding world. By exploring the …show more content…

Considering this, since DW Griffith grew up in an era where the subjugation of others was far from abnormal, his perspective was molded to follow this, thus leading to why he, and many others, could not grasp what the issue of the film was. With that in mind, it is important to remember that celebration and exaltation are vastly different from an informative display. The connotation of showing the film in a theater differs from that of showing it in a classroom or museum exhibit. As an example, recently on campus various statues depicting confederate heroes were removed from display due to those statues “become[ing] symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism” (Fenves). However, they were relocated to a museum where they are no longer celebrated but studied as a piece of history. Since BOAN was used to “express the

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