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Brown vs board of education on equality
Brown vs board of education on equality
Brown vs board of education on equality
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Fifty years ago the state of our beautiful nation was quite different. The United States were not very united at all. Fifty years ago a court decision marked a change in society that Americans will experience forever. The Brown vs. Board Supreme Court decision gave the old ?separate but equal? laws the boot. It marked the start of integration of public schools and universities. The process was not a smooth one to say the least, yet American society as it stands today is a far more equal because of it. However close we may be to equal it still is not yet equal. Artists of late have been expressing their view of American culture in many different ways. A particular group of artists calls themselves Social Studies more than likely referring to their portrayal of American social issues. At Krannert Art Museum this year Social Studies put out their third exhibit featuring eight artists? works that provoke viewers to reflect on issues of identity, tolerance, equal rights, and integration as they apply to education now. When I walked in to the exhibit I noticed a very interesting portrait to begin with. It was five separate portraits of two women, one white, one black, both attempting to sit in the same chair. The title of the work was Plessy vs. Ferguson, in memory of the Supreme Court decision that made segregation legal. The separate part seemed to hold true but the equal part was far more than lacking. Most cases seemed to be that there wasn?t enough to separate hence the reason for the two women struggling over the same chair. This art took me awhile to understand because my brain had not been geared to what I was actually witnessing. It wasn?t until I sat down on a retro style couch resting on a beige shag carpet rug facing a silent movie projection. The obvious use of perspective in this art form helped me understand the side by side projection of two different family videos. One was footage from a Jewish family and the other was an African American family?s footage. Both of the videos depicted family gatherings for celebrations such as barbeques, birthday parties, trips to Disney World and religious holidays.
Did you know that in 1960, Betye Saar collected pictures of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, and Little Black Sambo including other African American figures in areas that are also invalid with folk culture and advertising? Since, Saar collected pictures from the folk cultures and advertising she also makes many collages including assemblages, changing these into social protest statements. When her great-aunt passed away, Saar started assembling and collecting memorabilia from her family and created her personal assemblages which she gathered from nostalgic mementos of her great aunt’s life.
In Jonathan Markovitz’s Racial Spectacles: Explorations in Media, Race, and Justice he defines and argues the existence of racial spectacled in our society today. Through the reading and the general understanding of racial spectacle, I define it as the events that take place in massive media that virtually touches every realm of communication and popular culture in society. Interpretations may vary based on the event. The concept of racial spectacle is related to how Michael Omi and Howard Winant define racial project in their article Racial Formation. From my understanding of the reading, a racial project is a task, action, or law that is set in place in order to shorten or widen the racial divide in society. Racial projects are both positive and negative and in
Younge, Gary. "America dreaming: the horrors of segregation bound the US civil rights movement together. Fifty years on from Martin Luther King's great speech, inequality persists--but in subtler ways." New Statesman [1996] 23 Aug. 2013: 20+. Student Resources in Context. Web. 28 Jan. 2014.
How does one embrace the message and soul of artwork when you can’t get passed the color of skin in the portraits? Two barrier breaking retrospective artists born with more than 2,899 miles between them have beat down the walls in the art world opening up endless opportunities for female artist today. Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson specialize in catching the viewer’s eye and penetrating their feelings towards issues of culture, politics, equality, and feminism. It is well established that these woman specialize in identifying problems in their artwork, both artists seem to struggle with not being able to avoid the ignorant eye of stereotyping because they use African American Models in their artwork. Carrie Mae Weems doesn’t see her artwork
Kara Walker’s piece titled Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b 'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart represents discrimination on basis of race that happened during the period of slavery. The medium Walker specializes in using paper in her artwork. This piece is currently exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. Even though this artwork depicts slavery, discrimination is still an issue today in America, the country where people are supposedly free and equal. Even though slavery ended in the 19th century, we still see hints of racial discrimination for African Americans in our society. Walker uses color, image composition, and iconography to point out evidence of racial inequality that existed in the
In order to add something to their lives, [black families] decorated their tenements and their homes in all of these colors. I've been asked, is anyone in my family artistically inclined? I've always felt ashamed of my response and I always said no, not realizing that my artistic sensibility came from this ambiance.... It's only in retrospect that I realized I was surrounded by art. You'd walk Seventh Avenue and took in the windows and you'd see all these colors in the depths of the depression. All these colors.
Last summer, my then twelve year old son was asked to participate in the National Junior Leaders Conference in Washington, DC. So, I packed our stuff and we headed for our nation's capital. While there, we visited the Supreme Court and my son, never having been there before, was simply awed. A short time later, we went to the Library of Congress. At the time (I don't know whether or not it's still there), there was a display -- three or four rooms big dedicated to the Supreme Court case Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. While the case was something that Nicholas (my son) and I had talked about on a few occasions, it was interesting to watch him as he navigated through the rooms that had photographs, court documents, newspaper articles, and other memorabilia of the case and the people involved with it. About thirty minutes into our time there, he started to cry softly, but he continued making his way through the display. He went to every single display in those several rooms; he didn't want to leave until he had seen everything and read everything. When we finally left (almost four hours after we arrived), he said to me, "It's disgraceful the way our country treated black people; there was no honor in any of it."
The case of brown v. board of education was one of the biggest turning points for African Americans to becoming accepted into white society at the time. Brown vs. Board of education to this day remains one of, if not the most important cases that African Americans have brought to the surface for the better of the United States. Brown v. Board of Education was not simply about children and education (Silent Covenants pg 11); it was about being equal in a society that claims African Americans were treated equal, when in fact they were definitely not. This case was the starting point for many Americans to realize that separate but equal did not work. The separate but equal label did not make sense either, the circumstances were clearly not separate but equal. Brown v. Board of Education brought this out, this case was the reason that blacks and whites no longer have separate restrooms and water fountains, this was the case that truly destroyed the saying separate but equal, Brown vs. Board of education truly made everyone equal.
African Americans are still facing segregation today that was thought to have ended many years ago. Brown v. Board of Education declared the decision of having separate schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. As Brown v. Board of Education launches its case, we see how it sets the infrastructure to end racial segregation in all public spaces. Today, Brown v. Board of Education has made changes to our educational system and democracy, but hasn’t succeeded to end racial segregation due to the cases still being seen today. Brown v. Board of Education to this day remains one of the most important cases that African Americans have brought to the surface for the good of the United States. Brown v. Board of Education didn’t just focus on children and education, it also focused on how important equality is even when society claimed that African Americans were treated equal, when they weren’t. This was the case that opened the eyes of many American’s to notice that the separate but equal strategy was in fact unlawful.
Jackson, P. (1992). (in)Forming the Visual: (re)Presenting Women of African Descent. International Review of African American Art. 14 (3), 31-7.
On the seventeenth day in May 1954 a decision was made which changed things in the United States dramatically. For millions of black Americans, news of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education meant, at last, that they and their children no longer had to attend separate schools. Brown v. Board of Education was a Supreme Court ruling that changed the life of every American forever.
A popular saying goes by a picture is worth a 100 words and when it comes to my image (artifact), the same can be said about the image I selected from the whitehouse.gov/issue website. The image was found under civil rights and the image has a quote inserted into it. The image has prominent members of the society whom were very involved in the civil rights movement like martin Luther king. When it comes to diversity, the image compromises of diversity in race and age group. The artifact consists of landscape, the white house and the American flag and also it is in white and black. At the bottom of the image, the quote by martin Luther king inserted is "If the worst in American life lurked in [Selma's] dark streets, the best of American instincts
The way humans look externally and feel internally has been a barrier and the kernel to many of America’s social conflicts. Audre Lorde’s essay, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” attempts to answer why Black women feel contempt among one another. It resonates that Black women, in lieu of their hatred for each other, should replace it by bonding together because they share the same experiences of being women and Black. In the essay titled, “Colorblind Intersectionality,” penned by, Devon W. Carbado seeks to expand the definition of “intersectionality,” which is a theory Professor Crenshaw initially introduced as a, “Drawing explicitly on Black feminist criticism,” (Carbado 811). Carbado is able to provide other forms of intersections by
The film A Class Divided was designed to show students why it is important not to judge people by how they look but rather who they are inside. This is a very important lesson to learn people spend too much time looking at people not for who they are but for what ETHNITICY they are. One VARIABLE that I liked about the film is that it should the children how it felt to be on both sides of the spectrum. The HYPOTHESIS of the workshop was that if you out a child and let them experience what it is like to be in the group that is not wanted because of how they look and then make the other group the better people group that the child will have a better understanding of not to judge a person because of how they look but instead who they are as people. I liked the workshop because it made everyone that participated in it even the adults that took it later on realize that you can REHABILITAE ones way of thinking. The exercise showed how a child that never had any RASIZM towards them in the exercise they turned against their friends because of the color of their eyes. The children for those two days got the chance to experience both sides of DISCRMINATION. The children once day felt SEGRIGATED and inferior to the children that were placed in the group with more privilege. Then the next day the children that were placed in the privileged group were in the SEGRIGATED group. The theory is if you can teach a child how to DISCRIMINATE against a person that you can just as easily teach them how not to. Sometimes a person needs to feel what another person feels to understand how they treat people.
Artists associated with the Black Arts Movement promoted the notion that art should serve the needs of the African American community, while challenging white hegemony and the oppression of African Americans (Wofford). Despite having similar, yet thoughtful views on black supremacy, much like that of authors from the New Negro Movement, the “Black Power Concept” of the Black Arts Movement had ...