South Africa

In today’s world, violence is increasing. Whether it be about race, or species, it needs to be stopped. As of 2015, 776 people have been killed by police in the United States, where only 161 of them have been unarmed. Also in 2015, a thirteen year old lion was brutally hunted and murdered. This death of a lion, has had more publicity than the 161 murders of unarmed black men and women. This shows the type of society we live in, where an animal has more outrage than a human. When a black person…

This essay will analyze how the creation of the nation-state systemically marginalizes indigenous women because of their race, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. I will briefly define the concept of spatial segregation to understand how it relates to the film Finding Dawn and the book Ravensong. The nation-state facilitates violence towards indigenous communities through their laws, social practices, and institutional policies. Moreover, aboriginal women are highly vulnerable to male…

I agree with many of the points made by Woodson in this book and for the points I could not directly relate to, I could reflect and see validity in his statements. I like that he tries to instill confidence in Black people by telling them that their history did not begin with slavery and critiquing the way slavery and black history is taught. He addresses the issue of not hearing about our own, history, culture, and accomplishments while we praise the work and accomplishments of white people.…

In the early twentieth century, racial discrimination was extremely common in the south of the United States. Black people were separated from the white people due to the color of their skin. Schools were segregated as well as many other public facilities. A novel that provides a lens into racial discrimination is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. She goes into detail about how segregation affected the daily lives of people in the early nineteen hundreds. In the book, black people weren 't…

The way that the Scottsboro trials were handled by the Alabama court system, and the repeated wrongful convictions of the defendants in the face of exonerating evidence, is a prime manifestation of the way that racism worked in the South of the Jim Crow era. Racism is possibly the biggest factor behind the accusation of rape and the mishandling of the case. At the same time however, class differences also provided a motive for some of the actions of the people involved in the case. Ruby Bates…

Kill a Mockingbird.” The book shows how life was back in the day, when racism was at its peak. My third topic is about the symbolism of the mockingbird in the novel. What it means to be considered a “mockingbird.” Nelle Harper Lee grew up in the south with her brother Edwin Lee, her sisters Alice and Louise Lee, and her father Amasa Coleman Lee. Her father taught his children to always do the right thing. According to Enotes (2009), “When Lee was 10 years old; a white woman near Monroeville…

For thousands of years, female, queer, trans, and intersexed bodies, especially those of color, have found themselves to be the point of contention, and as time progressed gained advocates, some more than others. These groups often find themselves marginalized when placed in the binary system of gender, which tends to ignore everything but what is considered to be a “normal male” and a “normal female”. Like race, it can be argued that the idea gender is merely a social construct intended to…

Question 4 The issue of police brutality is sickeningly present in America and highly controversial. Instead of being flooded with feelings of relief and safety upon seeing a member of the police force, people of color feel anxiety and fear. Will this police officer harass or question me with no valid reason? Will they attempt to search my body or violate me? Will they even try to kill me? Black individuals are the most prone to acts of unnecessary police violence. In chapter 5, they discuss…

How someone views themselves is what essentially makes us who we are. That is also know as an identity. These identities are followed by issues relating to these identities. Those issues are associated with identities are called identity contingencies. Claude M. Steele wrote Whistling Vivaldi and it argues how identity contingencies exist. The definition given by Steele is “This book is what my colleagues and I call identity contingencies- the things you have to deal with in a situation because…

The topic explaining gender stereotypes is widely acknowledge over the world especially since the feminism movement starting around 1942. The two essays that were provided by the fifth edition of “50 essays” are “The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria” by Judith Ortiz Cofer and “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space” by Brent Staples. Throughout this paper, I analyzed the two given essays to see which I found the most effective for the category. The first reading, “The…