Summary & Response – Ordinary People Produce Extraordinary Results
Rosa Parks, who refused to give her seat to a white person, became popular in America and even was interviewed on CNN. Hence, some people called her “mother of the civil rights movement.” Before this event, Rosa Parks had spent 12 years leading the local NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.) But it didn’t mean that she created the association but improved the movement for change at right time. It told us that this inevitable act might never happened without the lowly and dispiriting work that she or others did earlier on. It also told us that the first step she got involved in brought a lot of people courage to refuse to move to the back of the bus. The description of Parks suggested that social activists would not take dramatic stands without reasons. And it implied that if we acted alone initially, it must go along with the greatest impact.
Usually, a historical change was represented by an ordinary person who took extraordinary actions. An African American activist once said, “When people who work for social change are presented as saints, so much more noble than the rest of us. We get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, never had doubts, and were bathed in a circle of light. ”
The Rosa Parks’ story also told us that even if being the ordinary grass-roots, you can fight to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy and so on. These activists taught us how to shift public point of view and find the power to protect despite all odds. Sometimes they brought about a supernatural outpouring of courage and heart. Give you a question! Do we have the chance to shape history despite all out uncertainties and doubts? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Response:
According to the article, it is “racial discrimination” evidently. Nowadays, this problem is still there. The white race thinks that his class is the highest among the black race and oriental. But I appreciate Rosa Parks, a black-skinned woman, persists in refusing to give her seat to a white person. This event inspires a lot of black-skinned people to assert their human rights.
Theoretically, everyone has the same relations on the equal basis, but it is impossible in reality. We cannot change the innate inequality, so we try to change our acquired inequality. In my opinion, I don’t think that a person’s skin color can decide a person’s class whether is high or low. There are still bad people in white race, of course, and there are good people in black race. Give you a good example. Obama, who is a black person, is an unprecedented black-skinned president in America. In his life, Obama improved himself constantly and finally he won the United State Presidential Election. And that is a black-skinned person. “The white race is better than others.” is typically stereotype. Human is human no matter what his skin color is. We are all the same and no one has special human rights in this world. If president do wrong, he is still accused by law.
We cannot discriminate a person by innate factors because he doesn’t want it, too. Equality is difficult and even we can say that is impossible. What we can do is to reduce inequality things to the minimum.
Actually I agree to what you want to say in your response, but I just think that racial discrimination is a thing that everybody knows, and everybody may ignore.
回覆刪除Just imagine how hard for white people to accept black people living in their country. Remember the film that our writing professor showed us? In that film, James Farmers’ father drove his car but a pig was dead in a crash with his car. Some white people came out and charged to James’ father for 25 dollars. James’ father knew that a pig did not worth for that price, but he still asked the money from his wife and gave it to those white “bandits.” In this event we have enough evidences to understand how white people tyrannized black people, to say nothing to the lynching.
Let’s suppose one thing: If now a black people moved in as your neighbor, but when you saw the black guy, he had no emotion on his face and said nothing. Would not you feel something strange? We all know that if we do not understand what a person is thinking, we can not judge this person as a bad person. But to me, unless he acts some gentle, I will not have a word with him. Even some people like me will react as mine, to say nothing to the white people who lived with black people for a long time.
For me, I only keep to one thing: no matter what people I face, if that person shows his respect to me and with no scheme, I will do what that person do as well.