Eyes on the Prize

I was listening to more of Macklemore's music and one line from the chorus stuck out to me, "Each moment's precious, don't let life pass you by, keep focused keep your eyes on the prize." Of course, this line stuck out because of the phrase "eyes on the prize" which happened to be the name of the documentary we recently watched in class. I realize that this connection is merely a coincidence, but it gives me a chance to point out some more of Macklemore's lyrics that are relevant to the topics we have been discussing in class, civil rights and equality. In one of his songs, Claiming The City, he talks about the problems in his city, Seattle, that were around when he grew up but he hopes will be improved by the time his children are "claiming the city". He talks about growing up with two parents and two cars and then realizing when he was older that most people did not grow up like him when he found out "there was something called a social status and my black friends weren't in my financial bracket". He also says that although he went to a diverse school, the city is still "divided neighborhood to neighborhood". In my opinion one of the most powerful lines in the song is, "to think that we claim that so much has changed since Brown vs. the Board of Education and Roe vs. Wade, but around my way it all stays the same, they just figured out a way to separate the black and white race"

The Power of Education

Recently we have been working on a project that focuses on thinking up an alternative way that reconstruction could have gone that would have been more successful. One of the sections of reconstruction and freedman integration into American society that I believe could have improved the whole scenario if it was more prevalent is education. In the modern day, education is a topic that has been in the news frequently and was addressed by President Obama during his State of the Union address. I've been thinking about why this is and why education is seen as so important by most people. This lead me to recalling a phrase, "if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, if you teach him how to fish he eats for life". This concept can be applied to how I think reconstruction should have gone, with education as the biggest priority. When we consider ways that reconstruction could have been revised, it may seem like a good idea at first to have given freedmen money or payment for their many years of working with no pay. However, I think it would have been a much better idea to use that money to give them access to a first-class education. It is my belief that the majority of problems and struggles of freedmen such as sharecropping and racism would have been solved or avoided by offering them the same access to education right from the start as the white people received.

White Privilege

During Mondays class we talked briefly about the Grammys. We had been discussing the portrayal of black people in the media and performance before that, and the two topics relate heavily. A lot of the portrayals that I listed during Friday's class about black people in the media came from my exposure to rap music and the "masks" that many black rappers use to attract listeners. All these discussions reminded me of a song titled "White Privilege" made by one of my favorite rappers, a white rapper called Macklemore. The song talks about how white rappers like himself are essentially invading the rap culture created by black people, and the importance of recognizing that although "good music is good music regardless of what you look like" it "doesn't change the fact that this culture's not mine" (lyrics from White Privilege, read all the lyrics here). He talks about how hip hop was created to counteract the struggles of being black in a horribly racist society, a struggle that he's never been through. He also mentions an idea that I have observed in the past but never really thought much of. The fact that the majority of fans at rap concerts tend to be white, even if the performer is black. Thinking back about the times I saw Kanye West and Nas & Damien Marley, I definitely recall seeing this. I would say the audience was at least 80-90% white, and seeing as the concerts were both in Chicago, that is not the ratio you would expect to see. I also noticed this line in the song, which I liked: "we still owe them 40 acres now we've stolen their 16 bars"