english blog week one

This past week in Honors English 10, we have been discussing and preparing for our upcoming in-class essay on the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Over the summer, our assignment was to create nine text logs on the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird: race relations, rural poverty, and childhood innocence. For the essay, we were to choose one of these themes and explore it in depth and how it relates to the big picture of the novel and essentially, the world. I chose the theme racism, or race relations, a prevalent topic and issue that reappears more than several times throughout the novel. After  comprehending this theme and thinking about what it really is and what it means, I've realized that racism occurs all the time in the world; on television shows, the news, in the media, magazines, music and especially in my own school with my own peers. I've never been a victim of racism, but I do know people who have been and it seems like most of the time, they play it off as a joke. I can see though that it's not a joke at all, it's hurtful and destructive and can tear people apart, much like racism tore apart Atticus Finch and his friends and neighbors, just because Atticus chose to defend an innocent black man.

I see incidents like that happen at school almost every day; a friend making or abetting someone someone else to make racist comments to another friend that are completely extraneous,  not realizing that their words are harmful and hurtful. Looking outside my own community, I see racism occur most often when it comes to our country's president, Barack Obama. Our society has come a long way by electing the first black president, but it certainly has taken a long time. And even after two years in office, Obama is still the main target of racial animosity. 

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Obama/racism-obamas-america-year/story?id=9638178

During the 1930's, the time period of To Kill a Mockingbird, people were obviously extremely racist and dogmatic about their beliefs, and while our country has come a long way, parts of society still will not, and probably never, accept a different race than whites. In the novel, the build up of racism ended in the death of an innocent black man. Just a quick shot and it all ended. The death of Tom Robinson can be compared to the controversial story of the BART shooting back in 2009. A BART police officer shot a black man who was in possession of a knife, and all in an instant, his life was taken away. 

ttp://www.sfexaminer.com/local/bay-area/2011/07/bart-shooting-video-shows-thrown-knife-not-threat-man-posed

The whole country is still in a controversy to this day about the shooting, and no one really knows why or how it all happened, or what the police officer was thinking. Some say he only killed the man because he was black, some say he fired the gun in defense. New information is constantly being divulged, but it's a mystery as to what's true or not. 

I'm looking forward to this upcoming week in english, where we will continue to dig deeper into the themes of the novel and the world. My understanding and most of all compassion for racism has most definitely grown over the summer and the first week of school, due to the compelling novel of To Kill a Mockingbird.