Final social diversity
Sidrina Ruczynski
ETH 125
5/3/2013
Kelly Hebb Campbell

Final social diversity “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be breathe free,” The Statue of Liberty has this written on the tablet she holds in her arms while she greet and addresses all to this is the land of the free. Yet for some it wasn’t and still isn’t. We the people had to make amendments in order to create true freedom. The 13th to end slavery, the 14th to give equal protection to all, then the 15th voting for all men, 19th voting for all people. America has had to learn how to accept diversity and all the forms that it comes in, others ideas, race, and sexual orientation. Through this is class I have learned that American’s have had to come a long way to get where we are today. Knowledge of how to handle and deal with the acceptance of others is learned only through failed attempts. From not allowing Asians to enter the country then placing them in camps during times of war like Hitler’s did with the Jews during the Holocaust. Also the brutal attacks on blacks during the civil rights movements, and now the controversies facing the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual communities. I can’t say that I have learned anything new about my own race, but that I have reaffirmed my original thoughts. My race is just and confused in their thoughts and actions as any other, and when we are experiencing fear we will react with violence. Like a peacock that flashes it feathers to make itself look larger, we flash our weapons and attitudes to make us look powerful and better then all the rest. When deep down inside we are still small and scared. We as a country are trying to overcome the past through the education of our children on how the future should be, by using the past an example of what it shouldn’t. Using literature as a tool in the class room based during the civil right movements, first one that comes to mind, To Kill a Mocking Bird a book from a child’s perspective and the lessons that she taught (Lee, 1960). Then Shakespeare that said that everyone feels the same pain no matter what you look like. Acceptance in today’s world doesn’t just start in the classroom thou many have a wide verity of students it starts at home and continues into what our children and we are exposed to. Other media sources, TV and Radio, have just as much influence on how people accept another as books and newspapers did 50 years ago. Everyone in today society wishes to have the best of the best, media show how those kinds of people act, how they should dress and how they should treat other. This is both good and bad, media can also exploiting, and create stereotypes in the minds of those that watch them. Movies with gangs and every one of the member is black, and for that reason they are feared by the community. That isn’t true there are white gangs that are just a dangerous. The descriptions found in movies where the effects make the hoods and ghettos look real containing only drug dealers and prostitutes, that isn’t true, yet that is what our society has lead people to believe. Then it travels down the long grape vine growing worse by the day. Because those that see it want to be it, and some will success at it turning a false ideal into a real one. There isn’t just one reason why people haven’t been accepted for who they are in American despite the open door policy that is printed next to the breast of our country’s great cement mother. But there a few I can think of that many will not, might not, would not ever want to admit. First fear, fear that what they don’t know could hurt them and the only way to stay safe is to show power and pain to that which we don’t understand. In the early years of our county Asian’s were not allowed into the country, it was even made into an act, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The reasoning, because the government felt them inferior (Harvard University Library,). Another reason