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Jenny Jones
DAlessio
UWRT 1102
21 March 2016
Final Essay
I examined in my research how racism has changed and remained the same during the
past 50 years. This topic had a lot more challenges attached to it than I thought it would. It is
very controversial so as the researcher, I had to look at it from all points of views. I had a
plethora of knowledge on this topic before I began studying it. My whole goal for this project
was to analyze the details of the information I already knew, and try to find how we have
progressed at all as a country or if we have just completely failed in trying to solve race issues in
America.
I learned from this that we have made a lot of change over the past 50 years with the
continuous issue of racism and discrimination. The Jim Crow Laws, which was most prominent
in the southern parts of the United States, segregated white from blacks in all public areas and
cause many large political and social issue in the early 1960s. These laws were abolished by the
passing of the Civil Rights act of 1964. This act made employment opportunities equal to all no
matter what race or ethnicity and also desegregated America. A year after, in 1965 the Voting
Rights Act was passed which allowed all blacks to vote in the upcoming elections.
However, these acts were not just passed out of generosity from the government. The
Civil Rights Movement had been going on for years and years till these laws were created.
Peaceful protests occurred very often in order to help raise awareness for those who were
continuously discriminated against during this time. Many of these protests soon turned into riots

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which were either caused by violent policemen or citizens. Police brutality continues to occur in
todays society. Many people of different race and ethnicity are subject to prejudice which causes
discrimination and leads to unnecessary violence.
To add on to this, social media has a big influence on this topic. Many people voice their
opinions about equality and racial issues on twitter and facebook. News is shared widely through
social media today as well which causes issues because of misrepresentation of information.
Also, in todays media, many negative things are projected to our people and not positive things
that happen on a daily basis throughout the country. This leads to even more negativity towards
such topics like racism because more and more people get worked up about it, which in turn,
leads to many more issues that are carried around in our everyday lives.
For example, I saw a tweet about the past Super Bowl where Beyonc did a part of the
half time show along with Bruno Mars and Coldplay. Her part of the Super Bowl show caused an
issue on social media since her performance displayed a message about racism. This tweet stated
a quote that said all these white people are so mad that beyonce is black and his reply (all in
the same tweet) to this was that I do not know a single white person who believes this. This
started a big controversy about generalizations and stereotypes about what white people actually
think of black people. This also led to many negative words and rude comments/ language being
said back and forth to the arguers. All this lead to was the opposite of what we try to accomplish
as a nation, which is to be free, peaceful, and equal.
Many movies and films are made about this topic like The Blindside, The Butler, The
Help, Hairspray, and many more. These movies show how we can build as a community to make
things better for all of us as well as showing us history and the ways that we still need to change.
Each of these movies strives to inform people on the issue of racism and how we should go about

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fixing it in the right ways and not in violent ways. Particularly, in the The Blindside, when the
Tuohy family, who is all white, takes in and cares for a young, athletic, black boy, Michael,
because he had no good parental influence in his life. They treat him with kindness and respect
like he deserves and gives him all of his needs. Michael soon becomes a star football player at
the local high school. The Tuohy Family soon learns how racism can effect a family and the lives
of black people everyday because of hate out of jealousy they received from other members
parents on the team. This movie in particular shows that all people are equal and they all have
talents and specialties.
From this, I can draw that we as citizens of the United States still have lots of work to do
in order to make things equal for all people. The Black Lives Matter campaign is similar to
protests back in the 60s because they are both striving to gain equal rights and better treatment
by the government as well as people. We now see that there are still many prevalent issues today
that have not been fixed since the 1960s such as racial stereotyping and police brutality. Social
media also needs to be more accurate as it becomes more and more important to our society. My
research showed me that we only have more work to be done and we are no where close to
getting to where we need to be as a free and equal country.

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Works Cited
Http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV3Nm3T-XAgVhKH9jT0ViRg. "Macklemore Just
Released A Song About White Privilege And Black Lives Matter." YouTube.
YouTube, 22 Jan. 2016. Web. 05 Apr. 2016
IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
Iowamethods12. "An Introduction to the Civil Rights Movement." YouTube. YouTube, 05 Dec.
2012. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
"Let's Talk About Race." Odyssey. N.p., 13 Sept. 2015. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.
Pratt, Discount Chris. ""All These White People Are so Mad That Beyonc Is Black"I Don't
Know a Single White Person Who Thinks This." Twitter. Twitter, 10 Feb. 2016.
Web. 05

Apr. 2016.

"1960's Civil Rights Movement." History. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2016.