Looking back at this final project I was very happy with the outcome and what I wrote because it enabled me to think back to everything we talked about in class during the semester and tie in all those ideas to my main theme of the essay, which was the role social activism plays in racism. Racism is very serious and happens everyday to thousands of people around the world. I myself have even experienced racism, as mentioned in the final essay. What helped me to construct this paper/eportfolio project was thinking back to when we talked about racism and social activism in class. What also helped me out especially is when I thought back to all the examples that we used with Beyoncé and her role in the Black Lives Matter Movement through her performance at this years Superbowl and the release of her new music video Formation. Beyoncé and her actions for the Black Lives Matter Movement is what helped me the most to start this essay because of the huge part that she played in the movement.
Although some of my content that I picked for this final paper were graphic I still felt like it was necessary to include in my final project because people need to sometimes see the truth and what is actually happening out there in the world to show that it is not all just fake or exaggerated. For example, one of my videos that I included was actual footage of Michael being choked to death by a police officer and in the video you can hear him gasping for air and attempting to say that he can’t breath. Seeing this actually happen is different than just hearing the story on the news because you can actually see what is happening and what that person had to go through because a police officer was treating him unjustly. I included videos along with my final essay because sometimes visual aid has a different effect on people and it can get the message across better than just reading 12 pages of an essay or article.
We read a few readings in class that had to do with social activism and racism but one of the readings that we read in class that stood out to me the most and I decided to use in my final essay was the poem Citizen by Claudia Rankine. I used this poem because she was able to capture everything I was talking about in my essay in her poem. Throughout her poem she focused a great deal on Serena Williams and how eventhough Serena Williams is considered one of the best female tennis players of all time she still struggled with racism and racial profiling and discrimination during many of her tennis matched due to the color of her skin. Rankine writes in a way that we get to see a glimpse of the world through Serena’s eyes and exactly everything she had to go through. Other tennis players would make fun of her, stuffing towels in their tops and shorts mocking Serena and she even would get called out on in tennis for being past the service line even though it can be clearly seen in videos that Serena was well behind the service line. I like how Rankine showed that racism can happen to anybody and just because someone is a celebrity, in the case of Serena Williams, this does not mean that they will not experience racism.
All in all, I was able to use all of these ideas and readings that we talked about in class and relate them to my final paper/eportfolio. By relating all of these ideas and videos and texts I was able to establish a main point which was how we can practice social activism when it come to racism through not only different movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, but also through social media, such as Twitter and the use of hashtags on social media like Twiiter. Social activism plays a huge part when it comes to racism and if we all stand together and fight for what we believe in we can someday put an end to racism.
mimifarhat 