CR#1_Method 2
Although the side-by-side method is essentially comparing and contrasting 2 texts, I found a notable parallel that seems to encompass all the readings. The connection is how knowledge, or lack of understanding, is used to both define a monster and manipulate how the community reacts to them.
In America, Black Children Don’t Get To Be Children: “Turn-of-the-century pediatric literature features doctors describing how black children’s bodies developed differently from those of white children. According to white researchers, the black fetus had a smaller brain, a wider nose, thicker lips, and “simian” hands and feet…black babies were born innately inferior and animalistic . Through brain measurements, doctors and anthropologists set out to prove that black children’s frontal lobes closed up during adolescence. And when that happened, their brains stopped learning and their genitals became over-developed and a sexual threat to whites.”
Here, a monster is created through the means of being intellectually inferior. This implies they are beyond help due to their lack of knowledge, they who can’t fundamentally understand the system, so there is no hope of incorporating them to a shared community.
Till Packet: “J. W. “Big Milam” is 36: six feet two, 235 pounds; an extrovert…slavery’s plantation overseer. Today, he rents Negro-driven mechanical cotton pickers to plantation owners. Those who know him say that he can handle Negroes better than anybody in the country. Big Milam soldiered in the Patton manner. With a ninth-grade education…The ruling class in Mississippi intended to see Brown repealed and was willing to use poor whites like Milam and Bryant to fight a war to that end.”
There is a undertone of class war between wealthy and poor whites. By stunting the working class’ education, whites are thus manipulated into racism and pitted against blacks. This served no one but the ruling class.
Trayvon Packet: Trayvon Martin was racially identified due to the clothes he wore, and how he seemed to be wandering around. Zimmerman most likely made these conclusions because he profiled the clothes the boy wore – “a hood from his dark gray sweatshirt over his head” and deemed them as garments that uneducated and dangerous people wear.
Transcript of Grand Jury V.5: When Wilson described Michael Brown as a demon who was bulking up, and that bullets did nothing to stop him, as well as throwing out vulgar language, all of this effects the audience into thinking that Brown may have “deserved” what he got. The statement in that he wasn’t able to comply with the law or obey an officer implies that he has no sensibly or self awareness. He is an animal without any ability to reason, or any higher knowledge that would make him human.
I’m glad you’re thinking broadly and seeing connections across the readings. There are certainly a lot of connections. I think though the problem with trying to talk about all the text is you don’t leave yourself enough time to talk about any one of the texts in depth. You give us a larger general way that all these passages fit together, but then when you actually give us the passages you don’t really explain how they all tie to each other and back to that opening thesis.
In your future assignments, you do really want to consider scope. I think it’s good when you’re pre-writing to do exactly as you have done, but then you need to narrow it down, so you can really get in there and think about how the language works to create these ideas.
Also you need to include to the best of your ability page number citations for your quotes.