What is the purpose of a society based on a social contract?

According to Trevor Noah, a society based on a social contract is when a group of people comes together to agree to share a common set of ideas, rules, and values. The purpose of this social contract is so that the society we live in can function.  A quote about this that stood out to me is when Trevor Noah says “There is no contract if law and people in power don’t uphold their end of it.”. When this contract is broken, society is broken. In American society this contract has not been upheld by law and people of positions of power, furthermore breaking the contract for our society as a whole.

In theory, a full citizen in society is someone who upholds the societal contract. This entails that you must uphold your end of what you agreed upon. This does not mean that people uphold their contract and it does not mean people are given a fair contract. We see this today where people in roles of power do not uphold their contract and this negatively affects groups of people in our country.

James Baldwin undertook the project of telling the truth of America through the lens of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. He specifically chose to talk about them because they were all civil rights activists who were murdered. He was “a witness to their lives and murders”. They were also distinctly different men.

After watching this film I feel disgusted towards how white people treated colored Americans. Seeing the clips of white protestors holding up Confederate flags and Nazi symbols trying to halt African-American protests enhanced this feeling of disgust. The video of a white group of men beating up a single black man made me mad that people with the same skin color as my own would have so much hate in their hearts to act that way towards someone with different skin color. Seeing the part of how the African-American teenagers born between 1990-2010 dying at such young ages, makes me think why were they not helped and what made this happen. Something I took away was how Robert Kennedy talked about how with progress, America would have a black President within 40 years and how James Baldwin took it as Robert Kennedy was telling African-Americans that in 40 years’ time white people would allow them to become President. This specific part implied that African-Americans weren’t considered equal until a white person said so. In a country built on the principle of being equal, there was not true equality. The film was eye-opening in many ways.