I Pledge Allegiance To The Segregated States of America...

I feel that everything that has started this third quarter of the year is showing a progression that has taken place in The United State of America. The first piece of literature that we read was a letter written by the forever famous, Martin Luther King, titled Letter from Birmingham Jail. Throughout this speech Martin Luther King address numerous accounts of which segregation has impacted the country negatively. One instance he discusses is the signs on many shops dictating whether or not those of color were allowed in.

This week we also began reading The Secret Life of Bee’s which contains a particular passage that stuck out to me in relation to the letter referenced above. This passage exemplifies the way that after the Civil Rights Act was passed, whites still found many ways to discriminate against the blacks. Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bee’s, shows this through the passage where Rosaleen is going into town to become a registered voter. She practices her cursive time and time again because she will be turned away if there is even a minute discrepancy in her handwriting. However I would bet that if a white man or woman had forgotten to “so much as to dot an i or make a loop in their y” they would not have been turned away, deemed ineligible to vote (27). This is just one more way that people find loop-holes in everything.

Which brings me to today, we have made discrimination something to be frowned upon and people still did it, we made it illegal and there were loop-holes to be found, we now have equal rights yet we still are verbally abusive to those we perceive as different from ourselves. There is still discrimination today, given it is not to the severity as it was in our countries past but that does not mean that it is something to be taken lightly. As Martin Luther King states in his letter “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.