To Kill a Mockingbird Black men were charged when they did nothing wrong. They were hung for the color of their skin. They were killed for saying the wrong thing. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson was charged with rape just because he was beside a white woman. He was backed up in court by a man named Atticus Finch.
The first paradox that Allan Johnson discusses in the text is: “nothing that we do as individuals matters, but it is vitally important that we do it anyway.” In the context of making social change to combat issues like racism, gender inequality, and other systems of oppression, this implies that our individual actions toward elimination of oppression will not abolish oppression as a whole, but that each of these actions is critical for long-term progress in eliminating these systems. He continues to explain a metaphor of a tree that represents society and that each person is a leaf. Overall, if one or two leaves fell off here and there, the tree would still stand tall; however, if each of the leaves were to fall off, the tree would die because
Within accordance to Kenneth Robert Jenkens’s novel, The Wilmington Ten, Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s Introduction in The Condemnation of Blackness, Stanley Nelson 's The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and Damon Davis and Sabaah Folayan Whose Streets?, the interpretation of African Americans being treated unfairly within the court system is clearly portrayed. From the aspects of having an unfair trial, to police brutality, to even murder, racism is a problem that has been going on for various years, that just continues to happen. The Wilmington Ten were a group of teenagers who were wrongly incarcerated in 1971.
To begin with, our class material and content ranged from pervasive novels and excerpts to compelling documentaries and talks. Consequently, many class assignments left students grappling with the issues of mass incarceration and experiences with race. I insist that, due to this exposure, my most important learning was being challenged to keep my mind open to and critically thinking about situations and perspectives that I had not been aware of or experienced. The first example that comes to mind was learning about the harsh realities of the discrimination against ex-convicts in Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
I have chosen to write my paper over the Michael Brown shooting. When this tragic event took place on August 9th, 2014, I never looked into the case. The only info that I knew was from what I have heard on the radio and seen on television. I automatically assumed that Darren Wilson, the police officer, was one hundred percent guilty of murder. After doing further research, I have found out that was not the case.
Lastly, violence against black people was very prominent during the Jim Crow era. The statistics for the amounts of black deaths from violence is outrageous. Fremon wrote, “In 1890 until 1917, on average, two to three blacks in the South were illegally hanged, burned, or otherwise murdered every week” (Fremon 37). Two to three black people were killed every week. The amount of abuse was so much and was for random minor “crimes” and sometimes black were even falsely accused.
The United States is often referred to as ‘the melting pot’ because of the different ethnicities and races that American society is composed of. Indeed, the United States presents an interesting phenomenon of coexistence of different cultures. Yet, it is important to understand that differences often lead to power imbalances, and the United States, does not deny that it has become a victim of it. For many centuries, American society was shackled with different types of historical inequalities, including ethnic, racial, sexual, class, and gender inequalities. We do not deny that the United States also has a shameful experience of the most rigid system of racial discrimination for one of our minority groups, such as slavery.
Since its inception America has been coined the “melting pot,” a term that’s intended to encase pride over the vast amount of diversity contained within our country. That pride, however, is nothing more than an idealization of the truth. America is a country of great diversity, but its pride and acceptance of that diversity relies on a contingent tolerance. Diversity is a wide term that can refer to a number of different groups and in this context it is referring to groups of minorities in America, particularly the LGBT community. Perhaps, the best illustration of this harmful treatment can be found in the media, specifically in the form of television.
Injustice means lack of fairness or justice, and/or an unjust act or occurrence according to the dictionary. Upon reading three stories of injustice, one might find that some reactions are more understandable than others. ‘Young Goodman Brown’, ‘The Lesson’, and ‘Saboteur’ are all stories of a character being handed some form of injustice. Mr. Chiu in ‘Saboteur’ had the most understandable response to his injustice. Goodman Brown learns about all the bad in the world from a dream, Sylvia learns about the injustice of racial discrimination, and Mr. Chiu learns about injustice through the police.
African American Rights Movement Violence. Fear. Segregation. These are the things African Americans had to face in the South. African Americans had a hard time in the South between 1955 to 1968.