Civil Disobedience: Movie Analysis

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All of the pieces that we were exposed to in class pertain to the defiance of a minority and their right or duty to change their society. For example, Henry Thoreau produced a paper he named Civil Disobedience. In it he says, “A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies” (Saxby). This quote says that the government is run by the majority and by default not by the minority. This quote made me realize that the point of being exposed to all of these works was to show examples of majorities trying to suppress the minorities as well as showing a way to change that prejudice. …show more content…

She traveled abroad and gave speeches that try to push the moral button hidden inside of everyone. Another work that did the same thing was the movie The Great Debaters. The point of most movies are to make you emotionally attached to the characters. This one pulled it off in a way that made you feel sorry for them for losing to the Harvard team, but then they won. Showing that the minority is only the minority because there are less of them with less political power. The movie also deals heavily with the suppression of the black minority. The movie showed how the racist whites would disrespect and look down on the blacks for no other reason than their color. Those white racists even went so far as to lynch a black man (Washington). In another part of the world, Mahatma Gandhi lead the native indians using his Satyagraha, or peaceful protest and nonviolence (Gandhi). In a sense, the British were to the native Indians as whites are to blacks, as the majority is to the minority. As a bully is to its …show more content…

They are the minority to the males majority, but not because of numbers but because of physical strength. Unfortunately for those men, in the modern age, strength is much less important. Men believing that they are better than women is akin to whites believing that they are better than blacks. And both views are just plain false. In 1843, Sojourner Truth began to tour the country giving speeches about women's suffrage and black rights (Gilbert and Gular). One speech in particular is called Ain’t I a Woman. This argument made by Sojourner Truth shows that she is not treated the same as men are, not to mention how the white women are, despite sharing an attribute: being women. In the speech, she talks about how people think women should be treated, but she is not treated that way because she is black, and being black and a woman makes her the minority of a minority. On that note, Samantha Booke, a black female who joined the Great Debaters debate team, did about the same thing as Sojourner Truth . She proved that the women are just as capable as the men by doing well on the debate team, and to top it all off, it was against the top white debate team

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