Throughout history path towards more freedom for self-expression have always followed similar routes. Like-minded people who feel burdened to conform to the society they are in will band together in groups to oppose these conformities either through activism, civil resistance, or revolution. In the last century or so we are seeing activism become the method of choice to bring about social change as people become weary about the use of force and start to see the benefit of peaceful solutions. Now days all most all forms of social change are done through activism. Everyday more minority groups that feel constrained by the limits of their self-expression are seemingly getting more traction then they ever have had before. On the surface level while it seems like these minority groups may be able to bring about the societal change they feel they need, under the surface these groups may be too exclusive or fractured to bring about change solely through civil rights activism. An example of this being the occupy wall street movement, which aimed to seek change towards economic equality, but eventually fell apart due to a lack of central leadership and clear goals. Indeed group based civil rights activism may likely find itself at a dead end in the future and instead will become replaced with new forms of activism that seek to appeal to a multitude of groups and beliefs, in the name of opportunities for self-expression.

            When it comes to greater opportunities for self-expression, a lot of new developments for it in the past have come from civil rights groups. The most common one that comes to people’s minds is Martin Luther King Jr. whose work in the civil rights movement in the 60’s paved the way for increased rights of black people. Before the activism of the 60’s it was nearly impossible for a black person to find a job and to express themselves tv, film, sports, etc. due to the intense racism and roadblocks that they faced. However, after societal norms against black people started to relent in the 60’s new avenues for black people started to appear in media. An example of this is Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek, who had the first major roll for a black person on TV that wasn’t relegated to a demeaning servant or housekeeper role. Nichols even credits King with giving her the motivation to stay on the show because she was such an inspiration for black people everywhere about what they could achieve, (Nishi, blogs.wsj.com).

            No one can deny that the civil rights movement of the 60’s was a breath of fresh air for black people all over America. However when viewing how well similar civil rights groups have done since the 60’s, many landmark cases have come from courts whose ruling didn’t rule in favor of the groups because they think they had been slighted, but because of legislation they thought to be restricting the liberty for all Americans. This trend was noticed by law professor Kenji Yoshino, whose essay The New Civil Rights gives an uncommon perspective on social activism, self-expression, and their future together. Midway through the essay Yoshino gives two examples of how the Supreme Court gave arguments for liberty in their rulings rather than diving into group-based rhetoric. Those cases being Lawrence v. Texas, a case challenging Texas’s laws on same-sex sodomy, and Tennessee v. Lane, a case about the lack of wheelchair access in Tennessee court houses. Both times the court ruled in favor of the minority groups and both times the ruling danced around the issue of minority groups being unequal and instead framed it under the guise of expanding freedoms for all Americans. Yoshino then notes that “In an era when the Supreme Court has closed many civil rights doors, it has left this one wide open. It is much more sympathetic to ‘liberty’ claims about freedoms we all hold than to ‘equality’ claims asserted by a subset of the population” indicating his belief that a new form of civil rights movement will need to form under the banner of liberty for all rather than equality, (456).

            Under the banner of liberty for all civil rights groups can take new strides on the front of self-expression. Yoshino believes that “the liberty paradigm to protect the authentic self is better than the equality paradigm” in part because in case rulings that site equality work to reinforce stereotypes, (458). An example Yoshino uses is that “under an equality paradigm, if a woman who wore a lot of make up to work were protected by a court because makeup is an ‘essential’ part of being a women, this reinforces the stereotype that all women wear makeup” essentially encapsulating broader idea that an evolution from the stereotype enforcing group-based equality civil rights to an all encompassing liberty based civil rights may be what is best for minority self-expression, (458). Yoshino mentions that even Martin Luther King Jr. towards the end of his life expressed his desire to fight for human rights, not just civil rights because it “carried too much baggage of the dominant tradition of American individualism and not enough counterweight from collective striving, and common good” making it known that even back in the 60’s King could see that a civil rights of based on universal freedoms was coming, (457).

            The idea that civil rights groups in the present hurt opportunities for self-expression isn’t something Yoshino holds by himself. Roxane Gay is a prominent feminist writer who has also noticed issues with expression in civil rights, specifically feminism. The feminist movement is one of the largest modern-day civil rights movements that focuses on the goal of seeking equality in order to obtain more opportunities and offer more chances for self-expression. Due in part to its large size and inclusivity, the internal workings of the movement often appear to be fractured or at war with itself. In her essay Bad Feminist, Gay notes that often she will see an article coming from another feminist writer lambasting members of the feminist community for daring to be stay at home moms or that they don’t try to have the perfect work-life balance and that they are giving feminism a bad image, (166).

 Lamenting how there never seems to be a solid standard that women in feminism have for each other, Gay goes on to say “These articles make it seem like there is, in fact, a right way to be a woman and a wrong way to be a women. And the standard appears to be ever changing and unachievable,” exposing her deep frustrations with a movement that is supposed to allow for greater self-expression, but in fact limits self-expression and even encourages women to fit into popular feminist stereotypes, (166). Gay expresses all the ways she feels she is betraying the feminist movement. How she listens to music that degrades women, that she both decries the unrealistic beauty standards for women, yet also likes to conform to them, that she likes diamonds, pink, babies, etc., (167). All these things lead Gay to believe that she is “failing as a woman” and “failing as a feminist” because they go against all the stereotypes and notions of what a good feminist should be like, (166). Despite the defeatist attitude towards her ability to express herself as a woman without feeling like the poster child for how not to be a feminist, Gay resigns herself to the belief that she is better off with an imperfect form of feminism than no feminism at all, (169). This is because Gay recognizes that, despite its deep flaws, feminism is absolutely necessary in order for women to carve out a bigger place in society.

It’s difficult to say if Gay would find the feminist movement more palatable under Yoshino’s idea of a new civil rights movement catered to the liberty and inclusion of all humans. On one hand Gay might find the emphasis on inclusiveness for everyone is better than a fractured membership and that the, hopefully, absence of stereotypes placed on her allows her to finally feel like she can express herself. On the other hand Gay is still concerned with the disadvantages of WOC in comparison to white women and how the feminist movement turns a blind eye to those disadvantages because they don’t want it to make it seem like there is a divide between the two groups. I’d imagine that Yoshino’s notions of cases of liberty as “a rising tide that will lift the boat of every person in America” would make Gay weary to support a movement seemingly unfocused on addressing issues specific to subsections of itself and more focused on improving the opportunities for everyone all at once, (Yoshino, 458). Despite some critical observations of the current civil rights movements, Yoshino does acknowledge that identity politics are still crucial due because they have brought and will continue to bring important issues to the public eye, even if those issues eventually become resolved through matters of liberty, (458). Even if Gay didn’t find the new opportunities for self-expression opened by Yoshino’s new civil rights ideas to be worth championing, I find it hard to believe that Gay wouldn’t acknowledge the merits of such a movement just as Yoshino acknowledged that group-based politics has done a lot of good before.

Personally, as a straight, white, middle-class, male I find myself unable to relate to Gay’s plight of self-expression in a movement meant to help prop her up. However, I do find myself empathizing with her general attitude towards the experience. Gay appears to be trapped in a catch-22 of feeling like she betrays feminism if she leaves or stays. Although Gay’s experience is her own, I’m sure many people can remember a moment in their life where they felt caught in between a rock and a hard place. That’s why I welcome the arrival of the new civil rights. Civil rights groups today appear fractured and confused. Many members of such groups feel divided against one another and stereotyped, Gay included. Yoshino’s prediction of a new civil rights movement free from having to worry about betraying ideas with self-expression seems like may be a breath of fresh air for people like Gay. Even if it doesn’t fix all the problems with social activism, the new civil rights movement may be the best thing for it in half a century.

Work Cited

Gay, Roxane. “Bad Feminist”. Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited by Barclay  Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 163-169.

Nishi, Dennis. “‘Star Trek’s’ Nichelle Nichols on How Martin Luther King Jr. Changed Her        Life”. blog.wsj.com, Jan 17, 2011.

Yoshino, Kenji. “The New Civil Rights”. Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited  by Barclay Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 452-460.

Throughout history path towards more freedom for self-expression have always followed similar routes. Like minded people who feel burdened to conform to the society they are in will band together in groups to oppose these conformities either through activism, civil resistance, or revolution. In the last century or so we are seeing activism become the method of choice to bring about social change as people become weary about the use of force and start to see the benefit of peaceful solutions. Now days all most all forms of social change are done through activism. Everyday more minority groups that feel constrained by the limits of their self-expression are seemingly getting more traction then they ever have had before. But on the surface level while it seems like these minority groups may be able to bring about the societal change they feel they need, under the surface these groups may be too exclusive or fractured to bring about change solely through civil rights activism. Indeed group based civil rights activism may likely find itself at a dead end in the future and instead will become replaced with new forms of activism that seek to appeal to a multitude of different groups and beliefs, all in the name of greater opportunities for self-expression .

            When it comes to greater opportunities for self-expression, a lot of new developments for it in the past have come from civil rights groups. The most common one that comes to people’s minds is Martin Luther King Jr. whose work in the civil rights movement in the 60’s paved the way for increased rights of black people. While the self-expression of black people wasn’t entirely at the forefront of King’s movement and certainly isn’t the part that people remember most, its hard to argue that more opportunities for self-expression opened with the civil rights movement. Before the activism of the 60’s it was nearly impossible for a black person to find a job and to express themselves tv, film, sports, etc. due to the intense racism and roadblocks that they faced. However, after societal norms against black people started to relent in the 60’s new avenues for black people started to appear in media. An example of this is Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek, who had the first major roll for a black person on TV that wasn’t relegated to a demeaning servant or housekeeper role. Nichols even credits King with giving her the motivation to stay on the show because she was such an inspiration for black people everywhere about what they could achieve, (Nishi, blogs.wsj.com).

            No one can deny that the civil rights movement of the 60’s was a breath of fresh air for black people all over America. However when viewing how well similar civil rights groups have done since the 60’s, many landmark cases have come from courts whose ruling didn’t rule in favor of the groups because they think they had been slighted, but because of legislation they thought to be restricting the liberty for all Americans. This trend was noticed by law professor Kenji Yoshino, whose essay The New Civil Rights gives an uncommon perspective on social activism, self-expression, and their future together. Midway through the essay Yoshino gives two examples of how the Supreme Court gave arguments for liberty in their rulings rather than diving into group-based rhetoric. Those cases being Lawrence v. Texas, a case challenging Texas’s laws on same-sex sodomy, and Tennessee v. Lane, a case about the lack of wheelchair access in Tennessee court houses. Both times the court ruled in favor of the minority groups and both times the ruling danced around the issue of minority groups being unequal and instead framed it under the guise of expanding freedoms for all Americans. Yoshino then notes that “In an era when the Supreme Court has closed many civil rights doors, it has left this one wide open. It is much more sympathetic to ‘liberty’ claims about freedoms we all hold than to ‘equality’ claims asserted by a subset of the population” indicating his belief that a new form of civil rights movement will need to form under the banner of liberty for all rather than equality, (456).

            Under the banner of liberty for all civil rights groups can take new strides on the front of self-expression. Yoshino believes that “the liberty paradigm to protect the authentic self is better than the equality paradigm” in part because in case rulings that site equality work to reinforce stereotypes, (458). An example Yoshino uses is that “under an equality paradigm, if a woman who wore a lot of make up to work were protected by a court because makeup is an ‘essential’ part of being a women, this reinforces the stereotype that all women wear makeup” essentially encapsulating broader idea that an evolution from the stereotype enforcing group-based equality civil rights to an all encompassing liberty based civil rights may be what is best for minority self-expression, (458). Yoshino mentions that even Martin Luther King Jr. towards the end of his life expressed his desire to fight for human rights, not just civil rights because it “carried too much baggage of the dominant tradition of American individualism and not enough counterweight from collective striving, and common good” making it known that even back in the 60’s King could see that a civil rights of based on universal freedoms was coming, (457).

            The idea that civil rights groups in the present hurt opportunities for self-expression isn’t something Yoshino holds by himself. Roxane Gay is a prominent feminist writer who has also noticed issues with expression in civil rights, specifically feminism. The feminist movement is one of the largest modern-day civil rights movements that focuses on the goal of seeking equality in order to obtain more opportunities and offer more chances for self-expression. Due in part to its large size and inclusivity, the internal workings of the movement often appear to be fractured or at war with itself. In her essay Bad Feminist, Gay notes that often she will see an article coming from another feminist writer lambasting members of the feminist community for daring to be stay at home moms or that they don’t try to have the perfect work-life balance and that they are giving feminism a bad image, (166).

 Lamenting how there never seems to be a solid standard that women in feminism have for each other, Gay goes on to say “These articles make it seem like there is, in fact, a right way to be a woman and a wrong way to be a women. And the standard appears to be ever changing and unachievable,” exposing her deep frustrations with a movement that is supposed to allow for greater self-expression, but in fact limits self-expression and even encourages women to fit into popular feminist stereotypes, (166). Gay expresses all the ways she feels she is betraying the feminist movement. How she listens to music that degrades women, that she both decries the unrealistic beauty standards for women, yet also likes to conform to them, that she likes diamonds, pink, babies, etc., (167). All these things lead Gay to believe that she is “failing as a woman” and “failing as a feminist” because they go against all the stereotypes and notions of what a good feminist should be like, (166). Despite the defeatist attitude towards her ability to express herself as a woman without feeling like the poster child for how not to be a feminist, Gay resigns herself to the belief that she is better off with an imperfect form of feminism than no feminism at all, (169).

It’s difficult to say if Gay would find the feminist movement more palatable under Yoshino’s idea of a new civil rights movement catered to the liberty and inclusion of all humans. On one hand Gay might find the emphasis on inclusiveness for everyone is better than a fractured membership and that the, hopefully, absence of stereotypes placed on her allows her to finally feel like she can express herself. On the other hand Gay is still concerned with the disadvantages of WOC in comparison to white women and how the feminist movement turns a blind eye to those disadvantages because they don’t want it to make it seem like there is a divide between the two groups. I’d imagine that Yoshino’s notions of cases of liberty as “a rising tide that will lift the boat of every person in America” would make Gay weary to support a movement seemingly unfocused on addressing issues specific to subsections of itself and more focused on improving the opportunities for everyone all at once, (Yoshino, 458). Even if Gay didn’t find the new opportunities for self-expression opened by Yoshino’s new civil rights ideas to be worth championing, I find it hard to believe that Gay wouldn’t acknowledge the merits of such a movement just as Yoshino acknowledged that group-based politics has done a lot of good before.

Personally, as a straight, white, middle-class, male I find myself unable to relate to Gay’s plight of self-expression in a movement meant to help prop her up. However, I do find myself empathizing with her general attitude towards the experience. Gay appears to be trapped in a catch-22 of feeling like she betrays feminism if she leaves or stays. Although Gay’s experience is her own, I’m sure many people can remember a moment in their life where they felt caught in between a rock and a hard place. That’s why I welcome the arrival of the new civil rights. Civil rights groups today appear fractured and confused. Many members of such groups feel divided against one another and stereotyped, Gay included. Yoshino’s prediction of a new civil rights movement free from having to worry about betraying ideas with self-expression seems like may be a breath of fresh air for people like Gay. Even if it doesn’t fix all the problems with social activism, the new civil rights movement may be the best thing for it in half a century.

Work Cited

Gay, Roxane. “Bad Feminist”. Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited by Barclay  Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 163-169.

Nishi, Dennis. “‘Star Trek’s’ Nichelle Nichols on How Martin Luther King Jr. Changed Her        Life”. blog.wsj.com, Jan 17, 2011.

Yoshino, Kenji. “The New Civil Rights”. Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited  by Barclay Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 452-460.

When someone thinks of literacy the first thought that comes to their mind is the ability to read and write. While the idea of literacy does encompass this ability, the broader definition of literacy can be expanded to include any sort of knowledge in an area someone could possess. People can have literacy in anything from Spanish to chicken frying to how to use a computer. If it’s a field that can be learned, it’s a literacy. When thinking about literacies as unique knowledge groups that everyone has, it’s easy to see how no two people have the exact same literacies. A common idea developed amongst those who know about the concept and the uniqueness of literacies is that they have a tremendous impact on not only a person’s character, but also the world around them. I can’t say I’m one to disagree with this. Literacies have a bigger effect on our lives than most could ever hope to realize, shaping how we identify ourselves, how we view others, and how they view us.

            Our identities today have never been more important. People are striving to know who they are and to make themselves known in a society where it may be hard to feel unique. Some of the most common pieces of one’s own perceived identity is the clothes they wear, their culture, sexuality, and their disposition around others. One thing that often gets lost when thinking about identity are these literacies that have been developed over our lifetimes. Indeed, it is easy to forget how our knowledge shapes us because we have been learning for our entire lives. But for those who develop major literacies later in life, the difference between their old self and their new self is night and day. One such example of this comes from the civil rights leader Malcolm X.

During the period of life when he was in prison, the illiterate Malcolm had been resolved to develop his reading and writing skills due to the frustrations he had when corresponding with Elijah Muhammad, someone who helped develop Malcolm’s identity into that of a civil rights leader (X, 257). Eventually Malcolm developed an intense passion for reading, believing “the ability to read awoke inside me something craving to be mentally alive” (X, 257). It’s evident from this statement that developing that key reading literacy was essential to the development of Malcolm’s identity, without it, it’s likely he would have never become the passionate leader he was in life. Just like with Malcolm, our literacies constantly change and shape our identities. Sometimes it’s a sudden change like with Malcolm, but often it’s gradual. Slow enough of a change to not be aware of it, but over time we are able to look at our literacies between then and now and see that change in our identities.

Different levels of literacy offer different perceptions. Someone who doesn’t know anything about medicine might perceive Gwyneth Paltrow’s alternative medicine as a legitimate form of medical science, while someone who is well educated in medicine knows that her medicine is pseudo-scientific garbage. The only difference between the two people is how developed their literacy is. Often as literacy grows, our perceptions start to change. One day somebody may find that something or someone they thought they liked or agreed with has soured in their mind, as the case with Megan Phelps-Roper.

Phelps-Roper was a member of the infamous Westerboro Baptist Church, having been a member of it for her entire early life. As a member, she was taught Bible verses that were used to justify the hateful rhetoric the church was delivering (Chen, 76). If someone had asked Phelps-Roper before her days on twitter if she knew the Bible, it’s likely she would have considered herself Biblically literate. And it was through this Biblical literacy Phelps-Roper supposedly held that she perceived the much of the world to be hated by God and needed to be told the error of its ways (Chen, 75). It wasn’t until Phelps-Roper joined twitter where she discovered a plethora of new challenges to her church’s dogma. It was through this discourse on twitter that she was able to realize she needed to sit down and read the Bible critically (Chen, 83). Eventually through her newfound Biblical literacy which contradicted a lot of the church’s teachings, Phelps-Roper’s views of both the church and the outside world shifted (Chen, 85). Phelps-Roper eventually left the church all together, in part because she had become disillusioned with the church. Before when she was naïve about the Bible Phelps-Roper perceived the church she spent her entire life in as a force for good; but eventually, because she developed that Biblical literacy, she could only think of the church as misguided.

Literacy not only defines part of our own identity and how we perceive it is also one of the biggest pieces of ourselves that people look at. If someone moves to France and doesn’t speak any French, the people there are going to perceive them a lot more negatively than someone who does speak French. Phelps-Roper’s new Biblical literacy didn’t just change her perception of both the church and the outside world it also changed their perception of her. When Phelps-Roper started to become more aware about the Bible, her church members and people on twitter started to view her in a different light. People of higher ranking in the church and her own sister Grace took issue with her objections to church practices that Phelps-Roper felt contradicted the Bible (Chen, 86). Meanwhile as Phelps-Roper became more friendly to the idea of questioning church values, people who she met up with on and outside of twitter became more fond of her. Eventually after leaving the church the people who once viewed Phelps-Roper as family now viewed her as a pariah, and the people on twitter that viewed her as a bigot embraced her newfound change of heart (Chen, 88). It helps to be aware that as one’s identity changes over time, so too do people’s perception of that person.

When talking about literacy it’s rather important to know just how much of someone’s life it affects. The knowledge that shapes our character isn’t concentrated in a vacuum. Learning new literacies or demonstrating old ones has ripple effects that are felt not only by the ones with those literacies, but also by those around us, seen or unseen. Had Malcolm X never learned to read and made learning a central aspect of his character, perhaps his ideas would have never gotten traction amongst so many others in his time and today. If Megan Phelps-Roper never decided to read and think critically about the Bible she most likely wouldn’t have been one of the leading advocates against the Westboro Baptist Church today. It’s always important to expand one’s literacy, but it’s also impossible to know just how much it may change one’s life in the future, for better, worse, or both.

Work Cited

Chen, Adrian. “Unfollow.” Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited by Barclay       Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 73-90.

X, Malcolm. “Learning to Read.” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, edited by Samuel Cohen,      Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014, pages 273-282.

            When someone thinks of literacy the first thought that comes to their mind is the ability to read and write. While the idea of literacy does encompass this ability, the broader definition of literacy can be expanded to include any sort of knowledge in an area someone could possess. People can have literacy in anything from Spanish to chicken frying to how to use a computer. If it’s a field that can be learned, it’s a literacy. When thinking about literacies as unique knowledge groups that everyone has, it’s easy to see how no two people have the exact same literacies. A common idea developed amongst those who know about the concept and the uniqueness of literacies is that they have a tremendous impact on not only a person’s character, but also the world around them. I can’t say I’m one to disagree with this. Literacies have a bigger effect on our lives than most could ever hope to realize, shaping how we identify ourselves, how we view others, and how they view us.

            Our identities today have never been more important. People are striving to know who they are and to make themselves known in a society where it may be hard to feel unique. Some of the most common pieces of one’s own perceived identity is the clothes they wear, their culture, sexuality, and their disposition around others. One thing that often gets lost when thinking about identity are these literacies that have been developed over our lifetimes. Indeed, it is easy to forget how our knowledge shapes us because we have been learning for our entire lives that we have gotten used to it. But for those who develop major literacies later in life, the difference between their old self and their new self is night and day. One such example of this comes from the civil rights leader Malcolm X.

 During the period of life when he was in prison, the illiterate Malcolm had been resolved develop his reading and writing skills due to the frustrations he had when corresponding with Elijah Muhammad, someone who helped develop Malcolm’s identity into that of a civil rights leader (X, 257). Eventually Malcolm developed an intense passion for reading, believing “the ability to read awoke inside me something craving to be mentally alive” (X, 257). It’s evident from this statement that developing that key reading literacy was essential to the development of Malcolm’s identity, without it it’s likely he would have never become the passionate leader he was in life. Just like with Malcolm, our literacies constantly change and shape our identities. Sometimes it’s a sudden change like with Malcolm, but often it’s gradual. Slow enough of a change to not be aware of it, but over time we are able to look at our literacies between then and now and see that change in our identities.

Different levels of literacy offer different perceptions. Someone who doesn’t know anything about medicine might perceive Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP as a legitimate form of medical science, while someone who is well educated in medicine knows that GOOP is pseudo-scientific garbage. The only difference between the two people is how developed their literacy is. Often as literacy grows, our perceptions start to change. One day somebody may find that something or someone they thought they liked or agreed with has soured in their mind, as the case with Megan Phelps-Roper.

Roper was a member of the infamous Westerboro Baptist Church, having been a member of it for her entire early life. As a member, she was taught Bible verses that where used to justify the hateful rhetoric the church was delivering (Chen, 76). If someone had asked Roper before her days on twitter if she knew the Bible, it’s likely she would have considered herself Biblically literate. And it was through this Biblical literacy Roper supposedly held that she perceived the much of the world to be hated by God and needed to be told the error of its ways (Chen, 75). It wasn’t until Roper joined twitter where she discovered a plethora of new challenges to her church’s dogma. It was through this discourse on twitter that she was able to realize she needed to sit down and read the Bible critically (Chen, 83). Eventually through her newfound Biblical literacy which contradicted a lot of the church’s teachings, Roper’s views of both the church and the outside world shifted (Chen, 85). Roper eventually left the church all together, in part because she had become disillusioned with the church. Before when she was naïve about the Bible Roper perceived the church, she spent her entire life a force for good, but eventually because she developed that literacy she could only think of the church as misguided.

Literacy not only defines part of our own identity and how we perceive it is also one of the biggest pieces of ourselves that people look at. If someone moves to France and doesn’t speak a lick of French, the people there are going to perceive them a lot more negatively than someone who does speak French. Moving back to Roper, her new Biblical literacy didn’t just change her perception of both the church and the outside world it also changed their perception of her. When Roper started to become more aware about the Bible, her church members and people on twitter started to view her in a different light. Higher up’s in the church and her own sister grace took issue with her objections to church practices that Roper felt contradicted the Bible (Chen, 86). Meanwhile as Roper became more friendly to the idea of questioning church values, people who she met up with on and outside of twitter became fonder of her. Eventually after leaving the church the people who once viewed Roper as family now viewed her as a pariah, and the people on twitter that viewed her as a bigot embraced her newfound change of heart (Chen, 88). It helps to be aware that as one’s identity changes over time, so too do people’s perception of that person.

When talking about literacy it’s rather important to know just how much of someone’s life it affects. The knowledge that shapes our character isn’t concentrated in a vacuum. Learning new literacies or demonstrating old ones has ripple effects that are felt not only by the ones with those literacies, but also by those around us, seen or unseen. Had Malcolm X never learned to read and made learning a central aspect of his character, perhaps his ideas would have never gotten traction amongst so many others in his time and today. If Megan Phelps-Roper never decided to read and think critically about the Bible she most likely wouldn’t have been one of the leading advocates against the Westboro Baptist Church today. It’s always important to expand one’s literacy, but it’s also impossible to know just how much it may change one’s life in the future. For better, worse, or both.

Work Cited

Chen, Adrian. “Unfollow.” Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 73-90.

X, Malcolm. “Learning to Read.” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, edited by Samuel Cohen, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pages 257-266.

Outcome 4: As mentioned in my writing for outcome 1, I found my peer reviews of others to be missing critical details. My critiques seemed to bounce between slight nitpicking and harsh sounding complaint, at least from my end. Maybe I’m being somewhat hard on myself and they actually aren’t harsh nor are they nitpicking, but I just can’t find it in myself to critique other peoples work. It makes me feel bad. Conversely, I wish people would be harsher regarding critiquing my work. In my previous high school English classes peer review was almost unheard of. Our reviews where often in the form of writing on rough drafts between the teacher and the student. As such I didn’t have too much prior knowledge about how to critique in a gentle manner, but I knew what to look for in regard to structure and diction.

The most recent extensive peer review done was of Celine’s empathy essay. Outside of changing minor spelling errors I didn’t touch the grammar. However, there was a couple times when I was slightly confused while reading a sentence, so I tried to suggest some alternate wording. Other times I told Celine to cut off bits and parts of sentences because I thought they extrapolated too much or that the idea just didn’t make sense to me. Looking back on those comments I feel like I was too harsh, but at the same time I wanted to help make the essay better. A couple times I complimented parts that where well written but needed to have a bit more added in order to give the argument some more meet, like in Celine’s take down of Yo-Yo Ma’s ideals.

On the second rough draft review I found myself complimenting the parts added to make up for any perceived harshness. However, I still had some niggles with parts of the essay that I questioned whether to tell Celine or not. I felt like giving any more constructive criticism beyond what I had given the first time was just me being somewhat mean. Especially since Celine barely gave any bad critiques over my second draft. On the other hand, I myself was wanting more from the peer reviews of my essays and I knew that the whole point of critiquing wasn’t to be nice. It was to offer valuable feed back to improve their essay. I’m not sure if this is a common criticism of the peer review process or not, but I think it maybe would have been better to do face to face peer reviews of papers in groups rather than through the toneless text of a computer. However, I am very much aware that we where short on time and had to make do with peer reviews outside of class. Overall, I think my critiquing could use a little bit of work. Especially since it can be a valuable skill outside of English majors.

Outcome 3: When it came to annotations, I found myself often writing one long idea on a single sticky note. Almost as if my annotations where mini paragraphs themselves. I’m not exactly sure if that is what annotations are supposed to be, but I haven’t received any criticism for it so I’m assuming my blocks of text are an okay way of doing annotations. Annotations that were just small little sentences I didn’t find worth it to write down most of the time as the ideas present within those sentences are ones I thought I could easily remember. I would like to think I had a healthy mix of annotation styles although if I had to pick one I used most often it would the understanding style. Mostly because a lot of the essays we have read have the actual ideas needing to be synthesized from the text. The one essay whose annotations I think shows my skill and offers a healthy mix of styles was Devil’s Bait by Leslie Jamison. I had only done annotations once in high school, so it is hard to track my growth from basically nothing, but I think there is some reasonably solid annotations in my third blog post. I found that Devil’s bait was rather long, but a very interesting read. It was full of gripping descriptions of suffering that coalesced into an idea about empathy multiple times over. The annotations helped me remember which section matched up with which idea while also giving me a detailed rundown of the idea when I came back to the section later. I was somewhat skeptical about using annotations again when first starting the class, but know I see firsthand how they help to compartmentalize knowledge. A handy skill to have if the situation presents itself.

Outcome 1: My second paper had the most and best revisions of any of my papers because it was the one I got the most legitimate feedback from. As good as our class is at writing our own papers, I noticed that valuable constrictive criticism towards other people’s papers was usually lacking in anything truly substantial. Personally, I too felt that my critiques of other people were lacking, but I didn’t why because I haven’t developed an eye for it yet. My second paper was teacher reviewed and because our teacher has years of experience critiquing papers, I felt that her critiques allowed me to revise and refine a lot more of my paper compared to the other two. The two biggest pieces revision I went through was the introductory paragraph and the closing paragraph. My original introductory paragraph about the history of social activism and how current day activism can’t promote real change anymore was a good start, but it lacked any sort of examples that could compliment my assertion. As such the original paragraph felt lacking in substance because of it. To fix this I added a sentence about the occupy Wall Street movement and why it failed. However, I felt the introduction now was a bit bulky and long, so I reworked a couple of the sentences in the beginning of the intro to be shorter and more to the point which helped the flow of the introduction a lot as it now felt like it was getting to my ideas faster while also giving a little support behind them.

            The two theses I drew from in this essay to draw from where from Roxane Gay who a civil rights activist is, and Kenji Yoshino someone who imagines a new future of civil rights activism. Throughout my essay the revelations of Gay and her disillusionment lean help support the ideas of Yoshino. Because of this I felt it fitting to make a conclusion about how Gay might view Yoshino’s ideas of a new civil rights movement that seeks to fix some of the problems with the current one she is in. I gave a lot of credence to the fact that Yoshino’s new civil rights has a lot of flaws in it that Gay might not like which gave me the conclusion that she wouldn’t agree with Yoshino’s ideas. However, there was a key piece of Yoshino’s argument about the need for current civil rights as well that I failed to represent. I rewrote the paragraph to account for this and instead concluded that Gay would take a more neutral stance on Yoshino’s ideas which sets an ending tone that’s less contradictory to the ideas of the paper. Overall, I think those two revisions are the ones that stuck with me the most and have given me a stronger understanding of what to look out for in both my introductions and my conclusions.

            Outcome 2: Thinking back to my time in high school English classes I remember distinctly how the papers I wrote were rather disjointed between the ideas of the essays or novels I was using for the essay and my own ideas. Specifically the fact that I was less constructing an  essay that was a conversation between the authors ideas and my own, and more that I was spewing the authors ideas out all over the first couple paragraphs after the intro and then using one or two paragraphs to present my own ideas. I cringe whenever I read my old high school papers because I know it was the wrong way to write an engaging essay at the time, but I did it because it wasn’t as penalized as it probably should have been by my teachers. Fast forward to now and I finally have written a paper where I can say it’s an actual conversation between ideas.

The Gay and Yoshino paper when I reread it shows how much my skills have grown. The paper isn’t divided into two blocks of someone else’s ideas then my ideas like my older papers. Instead I took the initiative and presented some of my ideas first after the introduction rather than Gay’s or Yoshino’s. I think that really set the tone that this was MY essay and not an essay about other people. After I gave my own example on civil rights of the 50’s, how they expanded self-expression, and why it’s different today I followed it up with two paragraphs on Yoshino’s ideas on new civil rights. The first paragraph held a lot of the meat of Yoshino’s ideas while the second paragraph bounced back and forth from Yoshino’s ideas to my thoughts on Yoshino’s ideas which created the sense that Yoshino’s ideas where actually being engaged with properly in the essay. Gay’s ideas had a similar structure to them although I felt that I could have done a somewhat better job of relating her ideas to my own. The conclusion where all the ideas of the essay coalesced together is where I think the essay shines best due to the fact that it bounces from my thoughts to Yoshino’s thoughts to Gay’s thoughts while keeping a coherent structure, at least in my opinion. I’m really proud of the fact that I was able to write an essay with good text to text connections and I think it’s the writing skill I have that has developed the most from high school.

Outcome 5: Personally, I find that this signal phrasing and proper use of quotes is still the skill that I am worse at. I have improved from my time in high school where I would just have sentences containing nothing, but a quotation or one that started with a quotation. However, I still find it difficult to know how to properly transition from ideas in a sentence to a quotation or vice versa. My Gay and Yoshino essay I think is very much a mixed bag in terms of proper signal phrasing. There are a couple sentences that are “Yoshino explains that…” then a quote followed by an idea which ruins some of the flow to the paragraph and is basically the equivalent to starting a paragraph with a quote. However later there are a couple uses of quotation that I think flow naturally in the sentence and explains the authors thoughts well which lets me know that I have improved somewhat. Overall, this is the skill I need to work on the most.

Outcome 6: I really love commas. Almost too much. I think when I went from middle school English to high school English I must have read a novel or essay that had a lot of commas in them and I made a connection in my mind that more commas equals a more sophisticated paper without realizing the purpose of a comma. As such my high school papers are littered with them. Splicing commas everywhere I could put them. Now I need to consciously try to stop myself from using commas all the time. This does slow down my writing process a bit as I need to restructure sentences constantly to get rid of splicing commas, but its worth it for a proper essay. My second essay isn’t particularly noteworthy about comma use because I have no doubt there are some areas that have improper comma use as well. However, I still believe that I have made a solid change to my comma use since high school although I still have some work to do. No doubt these writing outcomes evaluations have improper comma use in some places as well.

The main Cohen thesis that I thought of while watching Dawn of the Dead is thesis 1 that being the monster as a cultural body. To properly analyze this connection, there needs to be a separation of the three main groups of the movie. The zombies, the bikers, and the protagonists. The zombies are simple minded. The shuffle slowly down streets, outside malls, and stores without any real sense of direction until something that breaks the homogeny in their lives appears. Much like at how at the beginning of the film the common people rally against the warnings of the scientist because he suggests unorthodox measures against the zombies. Eventually these common people all turn from metaphorical zombies who all wanted to stick their heads in the sand, go shopping, and live there lives freely without a care in the world to actual zombies who shamble about the confines of their consumerist meccas just as they had done in life.

Around the time of this movie in the 60s and 70s there was a lot of counterculture to the Leave it to Beaver lifestyles people lead in the 50s. People started to challenge the ideas of marriage and patriarchal institutions which lead to some radical ideas about how people could leave their lives e.g. hippies and communes. From that counterculture spawned a counter to the counterculture that perceived this societal change as moral degradation. This is represented as a caricature by the bikers. They loot and pillage safe houses across the country, places where people are just trying to get by. Amidst the apocalypse they almost seem at home, laughing and smiling as they grab arms full of random objects. Toying with zombies by throwing pies in their faces before finally beating them to death with hammers or bats. They are at odds with our protagonists who represent the last bastion of society in the world. The protagonists embody what the old cultural hegemons thought they were. People who got married, had kids, and tried to live their life away from the chaos. The protagonists are vastly outnumbered versus the bikers and the zombies. This feeling of being outnumbered amongst the degraders of society was a common thought amongst the conservatives of the old guard as the years went on, before finally signaling the end of traditional values and uncertain future much like our protagonists as they fly away at the end.