Mini Reflection

I would say that two of the biggest themes of the course that I have felt compelled to and fixated on are women and power and the importance of youth. Through the books, The Color Purple and Lysistrata I feel like I learned a lot about women and power through the simple fact that both of these works convey which is that silence does not equate to obedience. I talked a lot about this in my essay on The Color Purple and how at first it might seem like Celie is this “obedient and submissive women” which is a cliché far too common, but on a deeper look you can see the moments of disobedience in her silence. Even, as Martin Luther King Jr. expresses in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” this country is deeply shaken and threatened by nonviolent and silent acts of disobedience. In Lysistrata, the idea of women having agency and power is what all the men feared the most as the women attained economic, sexual, and political power. The main purpose of the piece is to show that war and violence are truly are obscene. And what can be seen through both of these works is the fact that men get power through violence and women get power through nonviolence.

Secondly, an important theme that has risen out of this course for me is the importance of youth. Many of the books we have read focus on youth as the subjects such as, Bronx Masquerade, The Hate U Give, Drama, and Yolo. A lot of what is found in these books at a deep level is the idea of kids simply finding themselves in a deeply personal way. I think a major theme of these books is also the fact that we, as a society, underestimate children and their capabilities in every way. We negate the fact that children are as intellectually sound as many adults and that they are also dealing with as much shit that the world is throwing at them as children are, and yet we do not give them enough credit for it. For example, in The Hate U Give, Starr has two friends that she literally watches die in front of her eyes, and yet her parents are still talking about her in the room next door as though she cannot hear them. That is a simple example, but it was the first that came to mind because it is so relatable. That happens to every kid virtually everywhere where parents act like children cannot even simply hear, and there are moments of these kind of instances in a majority of the books. We as a society wildly underestimate children is one of the main concepts that I have learned something this semester, and even through the concept of banning books itself we are also underestimating children. 

When I think about this course though, I keep coming back to a quote from the excerpt of Stamped that we read, it says, “Because if there’s one thing we know about humans, it’s that most of us are followers, looking for something to be a part of to make us feel better about our own selfishness” (Reynolds 7). That quote really leaves me speechless every time, but I think it also accurately describes what this course and the works we have been reading are fighting against, which is conformity and “the norm.”