Response

There are three words in our English class that have been tied into everything we have read studied and discussed so far; paradigm, equality and change.

Throughout most of the Socratic Seminar we were discussing Harrison Bergeron and using that story as an example, but I couldn’t help to think of and compare everything I heard back to The Ethics of Living Jim Crow. We discussed how in Once Upon a Time there was a theme or an idea of “taking away beauty” because the mother and father ruined their home with brick walls and traps. I quickly thought back to Write in his story and how the color of his skin had taken away his beauty in the eyes of white men. If Write was a white man with the exact same personality, I’m sure he would have been doing just fine in life. Back then; the idea of “black skin being bad” was a racist paradigm that white people agreed on.

The seminar helped me to think of a couple of things; I realized that I don’t truly know what equality means, and I don’t know if equality is ever possible (and if it would be a good thing if it was). I also decided that change, or breaking the paradigm, is a very difficult thing to achieve, and being the first one to change is even harder. Each story I have read and discussed so far has helped me to see more and more connections and gain deeper understandings on these three words.