Bumping+Back+Reflection

Through both American Literature and community connections, this year has been very focused on learning about social justice. In this page I combined a lot of what we learned through Invisible Man, The Grapes of Wrath, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience to convey my feelings on the state of change in this country. I looked at past injustice, different poets’ and authors’ views on how injustice was carried out and what would happen to our country in the future. The first photograph is a famous one from the Civil Rights Movement. It is that of protestors being hosed down in the summer of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama after attempting to peacefully march through the streets. The Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With” shows a black school girl being escorted into what I can only assume is a school following the attempts to integrate school. The wall beside her says “nigger,” indicative of the hate and prejudice she would have to live with and hopefully move past in order to integrate into white society. While the last page portrayed a hopelessness associated with race, this one conveys a determination to fight for recognition and fight for equality on the basis of both race and class. I used the phrase “bumping back” from Invisible Man to make the page’s theme clear- it is about fighting for recognition and rights in the face of injustice. I used quotes from Ralph Ellison, from Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and poetry and statements from the likes of Langston Hughes and Tom Hayden, all individuals in some way connected to or interested in the fight for justice, under anyone’s definition, in this country. To give a contemporary perspective on the damning effects of race and how it impacts us today, I included a link to YouTube and Obama’s famed speech on the subject. The second half also deals with social justice, but it is more focused on issues of class and contemporary issues that I believe house some injustice. Quotes from The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle give perspectives on corporate greed and how it affects our nation’s poor. This relates to both the historic struggle of meatpacker’s and migrant laborers as well as workers dealing with capitalism and corporate powers in contemporary society. Photographs of “Mother Migrant” and the Newark Race Riots represent old struggles (that have merely scaled down) while a photograph from the exhibition “Love Makes a Family” and of a detainee at Guantanamo Bay represent modern forms of injustice and intolerance that I care deeply about. Last of all, I included two songs, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” and Donovan’s “Universal Soldier” which are both politically charged songs that question the use of war.

The American, The Individual?