Parker and Balko readings

While reading both the short poem and then the article, it was evident that the theme was referring to the way that people can distort the English language in ways that either avoid putting responsibility on a person or in ways that discriminate against a group of people simply by what someone has “not said” . To make it clearer, when referring to the poem by Morgan Parker titled ” The president has never said the word black”, the author uses this poem to highlight the ways that politicians demonstrate racism and discrimination to the black community by the simple fact that they are not taking into account! Parker uses a style of writing where she leaves blank spaces where the word “black ” could have been inputted to symbolically demonstrate how “left out” the black community feels when Politician’s blatantly show discrimination. This more deeply illustrates to the reader how a person or group of people can feel isolated and alienated because of something that someone does NOT say.

In addition, the article titled “The grammar of police shootings” by Radley Balko, connects to the theme of how something that is NOT said can have such a deeper rooted meaning and effect. For example, in this article, Balko emphasizes the clear difference in descriptions of shootings that involved no officers in contrast to shootings in which officers were a part of. One main point of his writing was that when reporting shooting’s that involved officers, the descriptions tend to be in a passive voice, resulting in a cloudy plot of events to the public and also in a way that maintains the shooter as unknown. Here it is evident that by NOT saying specific details, it is easier to keep the shooter and the plot very unclear.

Both these writings are connected in the way that they serve the purpose to inform the reader how altered or different a narrative could be interpreted not only by what is said but more importantly by what is left out and why this particular information was left out. This sometimes has a much more deeper meaning than what was actually said and presented to you. In these cases, it could be as deep as discrimination against the black community and also a cover up of a police shooting.