In her TedTalk How Telling Our Silenced Stories Can Change the World, Anne Hallward, MD, claims that it is the very things that we feel most ashamed by and judged for that can be the things that bring us together. From Hallward’s experience being a psychiatrist, she sees that shame is the root of depression, addiction, and suicide. Hallward claims that shame is the reason people feel so unaccepted. Whether it is sexuality, racism, mental illness, or past mistakes, people decide to…
At some point in almost everyone’s lives they have experienced the feeling of being an outsider, whether it was moving to a new school, making new friends, coming out as part of the LGBTQ+ community, because of race, etc. It can be scary to actually let your “true self” out instead of hiding behind a “fake self,” which Kenji Yoshino calls “covering.” I agree with Yoshino’s claim that Civil Rights can’t really be fully mandated by our government, that it…
In the introduction to They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein provide templates designed to help writers introduce opposing arguments, they say, and their own arguments, I say, to create a conversational and effective argument. Specifically, Graff and Birkenstein argue that the types of writing templates they offer will improve writing and make it more creative, despite some people believing that templates take away from creativity. As the authors themselves put it “creativity and originality lie not…
Yoshino argues that the idea of Civil Rights creates more division in society than equality. Civil Rights calls for equality for certain groups of people that may be experiencing discrimination, which actually causes people to identify solely with a group of people, creating more division.
