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My favorite non-lit unit was Icarus because I think it showed me that everything could be made into an illusion which teaches people not to believe in everything they see as there can be loopholes and exceptions made. In the documentary, the most well-known sports association had a loophole that allowed athletes to dope, questioning the integrity of the athletes. My favorite literary text was “Never Let Me Go”, as it also questions the morality of the human race when the line of ethics is blurred. The context in the book was very realistic and made me question the possibility of it happening in humanity.

From watching the 13th, I saw how racial segregation was demonstrated throughout history and how it is evolving. It showed how racial segregation was covered up by political issues like the drug war. It also showed how the government plays a role in the inequality in society. Which questions the intentions of the government, whether they want to protect citizens or implement fear within the society to create segregation with hierarchy. I thought that “The newest Jim Crow” was an interesting article because it showed me how segregation has evolved throughout the years and currently as well. This demonstrated that segregation is seen in various forms including the use of technology and as a society, we are misusing the development of technology by using it to lock up more people instead of using it for better purposes. “Let out people go” was the most effective because the structure is included a letter from an inmate who described the living conditions of the prison during the covid pandemic. There were also a lot of statistics that backed up the arguments and pathos used through writing in the first person. “If we, as communities and as a nation, fail to free people in this pandemic because we’d rather risk their lives than allow them to come home earlier than our criminal injustice system originally planned, we should consider ourselves guilty of utter disregard for human life”. This quote invoked self-reflection and helped me connect to Alexandre’s arguments by thinking about how I am subconsciously contributing to racial discrimination. I think that “Let Our People Go” had used the most effective rhetorical appeals by including statistics as logos, the letter of a prisoner as pathos, and Alexander also included some historical influences to appeal to ethos.

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Let Our People Go presentation

In both a time to break the silence, MLK and Michelle Alexander conveyed their ideas on racial inequality differently. As MLK uses a lot of metaphors in his writing, he tries to show his thinking in the form of imagery. Whereas, Michelle Alexander uses some of the ideas discussed in MLK’s writing and adds her personal ideas on it. I think with both writers being from different time periods, Michelle Alexander is able to add a more modern opinion and encourage people with the understanding she has of today. In Michelle Alexander’s writing, she uses the appeal of logos more, and in MLK’s writing, he uses more ethos and pathos. I think this shows their understanding of how the readers of their time can be persuaded and maybe with what context is available to them during their time since Michelle Alexander has access to more statistical data on the issue.

Our topic throughout this discussion was time-traveling is an extended metaphor to the neo-slave narrative. This is shown through the subtly of racism that society portrays and society’s progression in racism. As time goes on society has shown the abolishment of slavery and how cultural changes had led them towards the elimination of racism but there are still subtle demonstrations of racism. By comparing the difference in culture between the two time periods, I realized that racism is shown through a more patronizing effect in the 1970s. When Dana travels back in time, the culture and environment that is seen is very violent and dictatorial causing racism to not only be a social norm but also a societal standard. However, when Dana travels back to her present time, the racism is still seen through subtle behaviors, especially with Kevin. With our non-literary articles, we saw racism is still active even in the 21 century. When these subtle behavors get ignored and built up over time, they are no longer subtle and have become a social norm once again. For example, my article was about one third of blacks in america having felony convictions. In both time periods, there are demonstrations of racism in common which shows Butler’s metaphor that throughout time racism hasn’t progessed towards equality but instead has changed in the way it is portrayed in society.

After reading “The Injustice of This Moment Is Not an Aberration” I learned that the progression of racial injustice is an illusion to society and I thought this was very interesting since society is often advocating for justice and racism but when we reflect upon our actions in history and in modern-day, it shows that the progress we made is often undone in the future which proves society hasn’t made any progress to racial discrimination and all of our efforts in fixing racism is an illusion made by ourselves in order to feel self-comfort. “Despite appearances, our nation remains trapped in a cycle of racial reform, backlash and re-formation of systems of racial and social control” An example of this is the election of President Obama and President Trump, where society went back to elect a president that believes in racism going back to a time that was left behind. This example of the presidents shows the contrast between society. I think that society isn’t necessarily going backwards in their progress towards racial justice but instead need to have a common opinion and work together on it. To be continued.

Octavia butler is a major sci-fi writer and she is known for her writing in Kindred. In an interview about her, it was mentioned that she experienced racial discrimination throughout her writing career where being female and black gave her a disadvantage to her dream as a writer. I think this sparked her interest in writing about slavery during the 1800s. The idea of time travel allowed her to compare cultures between times which created a paradoxical effect. Octavia Butler uses a lot of imagery in her writing, this gives the audience a more realistic sense of slavery. I think that Butler’s purpose in writing Kindred is to educate readers about slavery through literature, describing in further depth than what readers generally learn about in class. This is also a way to bring awareness to the topic of racial discrimination and the origin of how it started. By doing so, it gives the readers more historical context of racism and encourages people to make a change in the modern world.

In Kindred, time travel hasn’t been explained yet. There is no theory or scientific reason why Dana is able to travel back in time. In the article “Professor Predicts Human Time Travel this Century”, time manipulation is natural and is explained by time being controlled by motion which can partly explain how Dana is time traveling in the novel. If time travel is physically possible and could be achieved in reality, it will question the genre of the book. Instead of being a sci-fi novel, it could be non-fiction. This also leads to the question of what humans can do with time travel. The political, scientific problems that could be solved as humans can learn more about a behavior or have a more accurate prediction of the future. In the article, “the grandfather paradox” that is seen in a lot of movies and a common misconception people have of time travel is not possible. This is a connection to Kindred because as Dana is questioning her purpose of time travel, she considers the possibility of the grandfather paradox.

In the first part of Kindered, the prologue introduces the character Kevin and his situation with Dana. Dana has an amputated arm and neither Kevin nor Dana remembers how the arm was amputated. The author begins the story en media res giving the readers context about how the story ends. In the first chapter, The river, Dana experiences her first time travel to the south. I think that in this chapter the author wrote in discrete details of where Dana traveled to and when she traveled to. Focusing on how Dana saved the boy from drowning, the author gave details on the physical appearances of the southern mom and son which hints to the readers that Dana traveled to the south during a time of slavery. I thought that this was especially obvious with the way the southern mom dressed and the description of the gun pointed at Dana. How Dana was treated by the little boy Rufus and his mom suggests that Dana is a woman of color and is experiencing racial discrimination. In the discussion, we talked about the parallelism in the prologue and the first chapter “the river” where the characters had a similar series of events.

In this unit, we discussed how technological advances can be an advantage and a disadvantage to society. The advantages being how society is able to access new and improved technology but during that usage morality and ethics come into question as society starts to practice the indoctrination, social stratification, discrimination, exploitation. The connection to NLMG helped me understand the similarity of the book to modern-day societal issues and as we discussed in one of our discussions, the post-colonial theory is one of the bases that started discriminatory practices.