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The Amazing, Troubling Book By Toni Morse

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The Amazing, Troubling Book By Toni Morse

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In this article written by Toni Morse, it covers whether or not “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” Should be censored if not banned from schools. She comes to a conclusion of how that the part that troubled her most of all was not the race issues but the social chaos, personal morbidity, and the moral complications. That this book was not meant to be offensive towards anyone but to be able to teach those the mistakes of those who have wronged. By banning these books it is only preventing everyone form progressing further in society. Essentially blocking the views that teaches us the wrongs of our ways and showing us the foolishness and toll of what our past casted upon those who live in it. By banning this book it not only erases the mistakes we have made but takes away a part of history and literature.

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In this poem the author Naomi Nye shows how people even today can still make progress. How when in need we are still able to unite as a people and not dwell on the past. To be able to separate our differences and comfort those in need. In the book 'The Adventures of Huck Finn' Huck and Tom united in the end to help Jim escape, even though both Huck and Tom were raised to believe blacks to be lesser they separated themselves from society and decided to do the right thing. Nye said in the end “This can happen anywhere. Not everything is lost”. She is just saying how even though in a few hours people came together through an inconvenience to comforting each other. How it is still possible to happen on a larger scale and help society as a whole to move along from the past and unite.

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User account The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets.

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Poll: Most Americans Think Their Own Group Faces Discrimination By Joe Neel

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Poll: Most Americans Think Their Own Group Faces Discrimination By Joe Neel

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In this article the author Joe Neel is showing how every one believes there to be discrimination of their own race. He especially focuses on African Americans and how it is having an effect on their state of mind and life span. What caught my attention with this is how people separate themselves from each other and how it makes a significant change in health. With discrimination it can affect the mental health of some people shortening their life span. According to the article the difference of life span is about sixteen percent. This only shows how we as a society may be slightly improving but in a long term are not progressing from our mistakes.

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Majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people's daily lives, according to a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The poll asked a wide range of questions about where Americans experience discrimination - from the workplace to the doctor's office - and people's perception of it. The groups polled include whites, blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and LGBTQ adults.

White Americans are among those who feel their group is discriminated against, with 55 percent saying discrimination exists against whites in the U.S. today.

These results are part of a large national statistically representative survey of 3,453 adults from Jan. 26 to Apr. 9.

We will be releasing the full results of the poll over the next several weeks, starting Tuesday with results from the survey of African-Americans. We will highlight and analyze the particular acts of discrimination that each group experiences.

The African-American results, in 802 adults, provide insight into the historically high levels of discrimination blacks have faced since arriving in America. These experiences happen across a broad range of situations: interacting with police; applying for jobs or seeking promotions; trying to rent an apartment or buy a home; or going to a doctor or health clinic.

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The findings on African-Americans have a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

The perceptions of discrimination are not primarily based in actions by institutions, as some might expect. "Most African-Americans believe that discrimination is due to the attitudes of individuals that they interact with," says Robert Blendon, the poll's director and professor of policy and political analysis at the Harvard Chan School. "A smaller share believes it's actually government or institutional policies."

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Fear of discrimination, possibly triggered by past encounters, plays out in different ways. We found that this fear significantly influences people's decisions whether to seek medical care, to call the police when in need, and even whether to drive or attend social events. Nearly one-third (32 percent) of African-Americans polled said they have personally experienced racial discrimination when going to the doctor or a health clinic, with 22 percent avoiding care out of fear of discrimination.

"If someone is avoiding seeking medical care out of fear of discrimination, they're at risk of going undiagnosed for serious conditions," says Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "We know that repeated stress from discrimination and racism can actually make some of those conditions more likely in the first place and shorten lives."

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And repeated stress comes from many kinds of discrimination and the fear it engenders. Numerous studies have shown that African-Americans are more likely to be stopped by police compared with other racial groups. In the poll, 60 percent of people told us that they or a family member have been unfairly stopped or mistreated by police because they are black.

That has consequences for them personally and across society - 31 percent of poll respondents say fear of discrimination has led them to avoid calling the police when in need. And 61 percent say police are more likely to use force on a person who is African-American than on a white person in the same situation.

Where people live can make a big difference, too. Our survey found that 64 percent of blacks live in non-majority-black areas. For these people, perceptions of local discrimination, opportunity, police and government and community environment were generally better when compared with majority-black areas, sometimes by wide margins.

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Our poll found substantial numbers of African-Americans who say they have been slurred or have been the target of insensitive or offensive comments or negative assumptions. A story later in our series will explore the split by income and gender in the chart below.

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Persistently higher premature death rates in blacks compared with whites was one of the issues that inspired this poll and series. The most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that gap at 16 percent, even though it has narrowed since 1999, when death rates for blacks from all causes were 33 percent higher than whites.

Many factors play into the gap, including a considerable drop in crime rates involving African-Americans over that period and improved access to medical care for many people. What we're trying to explore with our "You, Me and Them" series and poll is how the stress-inducing experiences of discrimination in everyday life affect health.

"Over 200 black people die prematurely every single day in America, in part because of racism in society," says David Williams, a professor of public health at the Harvard Chan School who has pioneered work in the field of racial disparities in health care. "This poll helps us see where we need to take action to address the problem."

The poll was conducted in the first quarter of 2017. A final report discussing major highlights from the series will be released in December.

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Poll: Most Americans Think Their Own Group Faces Discrimination

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Majorities in many ethnic, identity and racial groups in America believe that discrimination exists against their own group, across many areas of people's daily lives, according to a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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Racism's Economic Legacy Still Being Felt by Michelle Singletary

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Racism's Economic Legacy Still Being Felt by Michelle Singletary

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In this newspaper article from the Portland Press Herald the author addresses how racism was affecting her decisions made in life. By focusing on education the author is showing how society hasn't yet accepted everyone to be equals. While whites were moving on to higher education, people of color were fearing that attempt of higher education would cause them to lose everything. With this fear society itself cannot progress. We are not moving forward if we all don't believe in the same cause. Otherwise it would be hopeless to pursue this goal if it doesn't benefit those who are truly affected by it

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In this story this white couple graciously accepts some black people into their household for which they wished to experience the blacks culture. While even though they treated these colored people as if they were family they still never understood them. People can lead themselves to false conclusions. Allow them to justify their actions by making up reasons or excuses. Never did they think in the story that they wanted to be treated as any other person to have privacy or to be equals to that of themselves.  In the book 'The Adventure of Huck Finn' Huck started in the book treating Jim as if he were there just for his own amusement. Pranking Jim, hurting him, and lying to him. Huck later knows how Jim has feeling and begins to treat him with the respect he deserves. This can be related to our society with how people can stereotype others coming up with false conclusions and understandings. We as a society will shouldn't be able to judge those without fully understanding them but this is not likely to happen. For we don't progress in this way. We make it seem as if we use our intellect to draw conclusions without knowing others. But the real fact is we don't know them. That is why with the way we are right now we aren't progressing with our society.

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The Reality of Racism America Continues To Deny by Stephen Henderson

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The Reality of Racism America Continues To Deny by Stephen Henderson

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In this article by Stephen Henderson, Henderson explains how Americans share many different views and how discrimination can cause a gap between people. In Charlottesville VA a group of white supremacist tried saving their statue of Robert E. Lee, with no success they were confronted by a group of blacks and chaos broke out. We see how things as petty as this can have such a large affect. How others passion for things can lead or stem from discrimination. Our separate views are continuing to separate our society and will continue as we try to fix them. There will rarely be a middle ground to a solution. We are no longer progressing as a society just trying to delay conflicts that seem inevitable. In order for us to progress any further as a people we would have to put the past behind us and learn from it, not try and erase it.

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One of the deepest troubles revealed in this week of discussion, accusation and heated debate about what happened in Charlottesville, Va., is America's long-running problem with the idea of race and racism as systemic issues, as opposed to individual acts or expressions.

In the modern debate about those concepts, I believe we're called to connect more dots between what people do or say, and the context of history and institutions that give those words or actions meaning, or power.

And we saw again this week that as a nation, we are failing in that call.

Here's just one example.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions say he'll get after the white supremacists who staged the violent demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., last week, and he had strong words for the perpetrators.

Evil. Attack. Terrorism.

They are the right intonations, far more appropriate than the things we heard from the president.

Thompson Toon: 'Blame on both sides' in racist attacks? Kaffer: Did Donald Trump break the presidency? | Opinion

But let's talk more broadly about Sessions. About his withdrawal from consent agreements with police departments that have long records of singling out black citizens for harsh, and often violent or deadly, treatment. About his out-of-nowhere announcement that the U.S. Department of Justice would begin "investigating" universities that practice affirmative action in their admissions policies. About his doubling down on bellicose prosecution strategies that have led, over decades, to gross imbalances between the black and white prison populations in America.

So when Sessions says he's not a racist - something he has felt compelled to state pretty frequently during his decades-long public career - what he means is that he doesn't ride around on a horse with a sheet over his head and a torch in his hands, shouting racial epithets and maybe burning down people's houses. And he can identify those who do those things as problematic, un-American, even immoral.

But he doesn't recognize the fundamental and systemic ways in which American government and culture are imbued with the intent and purpose of those garishly racist acts.

He doesn't see how systemic police abuse of African Americans throws back to the violent repression of the civil rights movement, the century-long enforcement of Jim Crow and the sheer brutality of slavery.

He sees affirmative action - a wildly modest effort to counter 300 years' worth of institutional imbalances that leave blacks with fewer educational opportunities - as an attack on fairness.

And he sees get-tough prosecution as an expression of law and order, without stopping to contemplate why the nation's sentencing commission found black drug users six times more likely to be imprisoned than white users.

Henderson: What's the source for white anger on display in Charlottesville? More: Michigan has long been fertile ground for the far right

Through a quintessentially American form of intellectual dissociation, he calls himself a champion for equality, even as he girds, defends and even accelerates policies that are an expressive outgrowth of the torch-bearing racism he vows to take on.

He says he's not a racist, while embracing the very tenets of institutional racism that have defined the United States for centuries.

And sadly, too much of the nation feels the same way.

It's a set-up

This is where, for instance, someone like President Donald Trump gains the currency to equate counter-protesters in Charlottesville with the torch-bearing racists who incited the violence in the first place.

If each side is stripped of its historical context, and everyone is seen as an individual, acting without connection to that context, then it's easy to equate anti-fascists with white supremacists.

Violence is violence, right?

But that false narrative dangerously forgets the tremendous moral imbalances between those who have used violence, from the jump, to assault and suppress the most basic human rights of others - and those who have indulged violence to counter it.

These differences matter, in substantive terms that are critical to the very idea of America and its claim - its tenuous, compromised claim - to virtue in the name of liberty. And if we don't get that right, we cede any connection to that virtue. We give up on the idea that liberty, and its close cousin, justice, have any meaning in this nation.

Washington vs. Lee

The gap in American understanding of individual and systemic inequality also clouds the rhetoric surrounding the ongoing removal of Confederate monuments in some southern states.

Trump asked, rhetorically, where this effort might end, and whether other historical figures who were connected to bigotry might also be targeted.

Again, it's only through falsely narrow lenses that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee can be compared to George Washington.

Both men believed in, and practiced slavery. That's undeniable. As individuals, they struggled with the same moral failings. They have both contributed to building the structures of inequality that exist today.

But Washington led a revolution against tyranny that took the shape of brutal suppression of individual liberty and freedom. The country he helped establish is a lure - compromised by its own struggles, but resolute in its journey forward - for freedom-seeking people everywhere.

Lee and other Confederates led a revolution to preserve their rights to dehumanize an entire race. As South Carolina, the first state to secede, said in its farewell to the North, the union had "denounced as sinful the institution of slavery ... They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection."

The South's original sin separates it - not completely, but importantly - from the rest of the nation's flawed but persistent efforts to actually fulfill the ideals behind the phrase, "all men are created equal."

The way forward, or the way back?

This shouldn't be a difficult set of concepts to understand, or embrace. And I can't tell, honestly, whether people like Sessions and Trump are truly confounded, or cynically playing to confusion as a way of gaining political advantage from those who truly don't understand.

Either way, it has never been more important to push back against the attempted minimization of the systemic context and history that surround race and racism in America.

The most substantive progress we've made in addressing longstanding, systemic wrongs, with policies like the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action or anti-discrimination laws, have come at precisely those moments when we've connected modern failings to that historical context.

When Sessions and Trump deny that context, it's a step toward intellectual and moral darkness, and away from the nation's slow, steady march to equality.

But we don't have to let that happen. There's still a way forward, but only if we acknowledge the full weight of our past, and how we let it inform our future.

Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2xburbx

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Henderson: The reality of racism America continues to deny

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One of the deepest troubles revealed in this week of discussion, accusation and heated debate about what happened in Charlottesville, Va., is America's long-running problem with the idea of race and racism as systemic issues, as opposed to individual acts or expressions.

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Blacks and Whites see Racism in the United States Very Very Differently by Ryan Struyk  

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Blacks and Whites see Racism in the United States Very Very Differently by Ryan Struyk  

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Racism as we know it is a tool that separates us and as long as it exist will continue to separate us. While it is not socially accepted in the US many believe it still exist and many of which believes it is towards themselves. Whites believe reverse racism is affecting them and blacks believe racism hasn't stopped hurting them. Can it be both. Can this fine line of race be battling on both sides? Is Racism simply causing Racism? All we really know is that Racism is there. With the course of action we are taking we are not creating a solution. We are holding on to the past of which we have never seen. Holding on to pain of which we have never felt. In order for us to move on we have to embrace what we have become. To not look for a problem but to solve the problems we already have. Adding more conflicts to the solution is just adding more problems we need to solve. We already have a list of problems large enough that it may not even be solved in our children's lifetime, so we shouldn't try to make that list any longer. For Society to stop moving sideways we need to stop looking behind us.

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blacks and whites see racism in the united states very

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Blacks and whites see racism in the United States very, very differently

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How you see race in the United States can depend a lot on your own background.

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In this interactive video it explored the idea of why the N word shouldn't be offensive any longer. How people are still holding onto this idea. With this way of thinking people are just giving more power to this word than it really should have at this point. by giving it more power than it has it consumes others ideas. While today the N word is just a pop culture idea, others will continue to cling onto the past of it being an offensive term. Similar to the term Jay which used to be an insult when car companies introduced the term jay walking giving people the idea how walking in the road in front of cars was bad because they didn't want to be a jay. Similar to the book 'The Adventures of Huck Finn' Jim has much influence with the word choices he uses with Huck, Jim saying how Huck was a friend and how you shouldn't makes friends ashamed. Jim's use of the world friend gave his argument more power into making Huck feel guilty of his actions leading to him eventually apologizing. This shows how powerful words can really be and in order for our society to progress we are going to have to no longer give this word so much power or no longer attach ourselves to it. Or we really aren't progressing in society at all.

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Explore perspectives.
Select three to see a custom video.

Start your own conversation

Add a question or use one of the submitted questions to start a conversation with your social network. (Note: The n-word has not been filtered from submissions.)

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n-word; donte stallworth; neal brennan; dave chappelle show; nfl; national football leagues bans nword; nfl bans the nword; nigger; nigga; nigger vs nigga; kkk; ku klux klan; jay z; oprah;

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The n-word: An interactive project exploring a singular word

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After the National Football League made the controversial decision to ban the n-word on the field this year, a team of Washington Post journalists explored the history of the word, its evolution and its place in American vernacular today.

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Racism in America Challenges the Modern World by Ciudad Paz-ando

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Racism in America Challenges the Modern World by Ciudad Paz-ando

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In this article Paz-ando brings facts from the past and recent events of police brutality to determine where we stand as a society on racism. While the past does show mistakes and triumphs we as a society have made, it should not define what we have become. Letting the past define our future only blinds us to what we are trying to escape. Similar to the book The Adventures of Huck Finn, Huck has a moral battle with himself whether he would comply with society and turn Jim in or make his own path and help Jim. Huck eventually strayed from society for he saw the trail of chaos that followed from society's trail. Today society like any other in the history of our world is doomed to make some mistakes the same. Yet it is a burden that we must erase to progress. By getting away from this cycle of which we continue we will be able to alleviate the problems from it allowing us to move forward as a whole.

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24 Hour Corwdfunding To End Racism In America

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24 Hour Corwdfunding To End Racism In America

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This was a GoFundMe campaign to produce a book that would help end racism in America. Celebrities and people from all around helped contribute to the cause by donations and endorsements. The point is that our society was able to come together to fight against racism as a whole. Like in the book 'The Adventures of Huck Finn' Huck and Tom were able to unite and save Jim. Bonds we make between each other are what we use to create our society. So if we learn to make a bond that intertwines everyone one could essentially get rid of all discrimination. Having us all rely on each other. However it is a unlikely cause in general. We all have separate visions for this world. Some show visions don't cross paths with others. So it would be likely for everyone to completely move forward making our society stay in place and only delay what stances we should be making.