Check Homework #19: Write a 3-paragraph essay that supports or refutes MLK's claim that civil disobedience is justified.
HW#20: Read the Rolling Stone online essay: "Anti-Vaxxers: Enjoying the Privilege of Putting everyone at Risk" by Jeb Lund and write a 3-paragraph essay connecting whtie privilege to the anti-vaxxer movement.
Essay #5, Your Capstone Essay worth 225 points Due May 31
You must have 3 sources for your MLA Works Cited.
Option One. In the context of the Netflix documentary Dirty Money, Episode #2, "Payday," write an argumentative essay that answers the question: Were Scott Tucker and his associates fairly prosecuted or did the government overreach its powers and exact unjust punishment on these allegedly greedy businessmen? Be sure to have a counterargument section. For your required 3 sources, you can use the documentary, the Vulture review, and the Atlantic review.
Option Two. In the context of the Netflix documentary Dirty Money, Episode #1, "Hard Nox," support, refute, or complicate the assertion that in spite of Volkswagen's 30 billion dollars paid in fines and legal fees for committing fraud and other crimes, that their ascent in the world economy is evidence that Volkswagen, as an agency of unbridled corporate greed, has triumphed over the wheels of justice. You must have a counterargument section. For your required 3 sources, you can use the documentary, the Vulture review, and the Atlantic review.
Option Three. In the context of the essays in Chapter 10, defend, refute, or complicate the assertion that young people should be required to perform public service.
Option Four. Defend, refute, or complicate Martin Luther King’s justification of civil disobedience in his essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (309)
Option Five. In the context of the online essay “Anti-Vaxxers: Enjoying the Privilege of Putting Everyone at Risk” by Jeb Lund, support, defend, or complicate the assertion that the vaccination crisis results largely from the hubris of white privilege. You can refer to the John Oliver video on vaccinations.
Option Six. In the context of “The War on Stupid People” by David H. Freedman, support, refute, or complicate the notion that society places misplaced admiration for intelligent people.
Option Seven. Support, defend, or refute the notion that college debt should be forgiven.
Option Eight. Support, refute, or complicate the argument that college should be free.
For context, see Chapter 11 in your book. Also consult the following:
Forgiving All Student Loan Debt Would be an Awful, Regressive Idea The Problem with Public Colleges Going Tuition-Free
Status Quo and Its Relation to "Letter to Birmingham Jail"
Status quo: "The way things are"; the acceptance of the current system, including power structure.
Why do we accept the status quo as it is even when it may need change by putting pressure on those in power?
One. Our surroundings, no matter how hideous, become our normal.
We may have a leak in our children's first grade classroom, and the ceiling has a plastic garbage bag taped to it collecting asbestos, lead, contaminated water.
Two. Apathy. We may be in a college classroom where the clock hasn't worked all semester. Or in some classrooms, the clocks have been removed revealing a gaping hole in the wall with two ugly wires jutting from the dark aperture. "What can you do?"
Third. Fatigue. "Let someone else deal with it. I'm too tired dealing with my own stuff."
Four. Privilege. Your privilege gives you the luxury of doing nothing about a some sort of problem or social injustice.
Five. We're told to play the waiting game. "Just wait. Things will get better on their own. They always do."
Six. Fear. "I don't want to stir trouble and lose my social status, my job, or my citizen's rights while getting thrown in jail. Just keep me off the government's radar screen, and I'll be happy."
Seven. Desire to obey the law. "My parents raised me to follow the laws of the land. What are you asking me to do, become an outlaw?"
Eight. Concern over civil unrest. "You ask me to join you in civil disobedience, and that might lead to chaos, economic upheaval, instability. I could lose my job, I could lose resources, I could lose income. You're asking too much. Get away from me."
Nine. False comfort. Most people are lulled into a false comfort by the status quo. They are comforted by familiarity, predictability, and monotony. The last thing they want is change.
What are the effects of accepting the status quo?
One. Power gains a foothold on us. Power gets stronger and those under power get weaker and weaker.
Two. We become complacent and full of false contentment for our mediocrity.
Three. We go into denial about broken things about personal life and our society at large.
Four. We stop growing as human beings.
Five. Over time, the status quo becomes our parent and we become its obedient child. This eventually becomes a form of enslavement, a type that we cannot see.
Six. Over time, acceptance of the status quo seals us inside a dark cave of ignorance, a prolonged state of spiritual oblivion, a condition known in the Arabic language as the Jayiliyyah. Another spelling is Jahiliya.
See Jaylen Bledsoe's "Don't Accept the Status Quo."
What can you do to escape the prison of the status quo?
One. Learn to be uncomfortable when you get too comfortable because most likely excessive comfort results from acclimating to a tiny world, an insulated bubble where you stop growing and lose IQ points.
Two. Observe people you know well who have succumbed to the status quo for many years, perhaps decades, and ask yourself if you want to follow their footsteps. You may or may not. For some, such status quo people represent security; for others, such status quo people represent death.
Three. Learn to identify why there may be things about you that need change but that you have deceived yourself into believing are too late to change or not broken enough to merit fixing.
Four. Learn to identify exactly what your personal status quo is and how you might be a better person or a person with significantly more advantages if you were to break out of your status quo.
Study Questions for "Letter to Birmingham Jail"
One. Why does King begin by mentioning that his opposition consists of men who are "of genuine good will" and sincerity?
King wants to establish that his default setting for addressing a conflict such as racial injustice and the manner in which he refutes his adversaries to be in a way that is full of peace, law, order, and common sense.
In this manner, when he makes the claim that law and order must be substituted by harsher measures such as civil disobedience.
In life, we all have our mild setting, but we need a contingency for when our adversaries aren't playing by the rules.
For example, we may have a vagabond uncle who is staying in our house "for a few days," but the days turn into weeks, and months and our first inclination to be kind to our uncle and plead with him to make arrangements is substituted by harsher measures.
By calling his adversaries people full of good will, he is establishing pathos and ethos, emotional sympathy and moral credibility.
Two. How does King frame his civil disobedience in a way as to show it as a virtue, not a crime?
He compares his struggle for justice with the Old Testament prophets of eighth century B.C. and the Apostle Paul who risked their lives to carry the gospel of love and justice to the world.
King is speaking to a what is largely a Christian nation in 1963 so his rhetoric is appropriate to his audience.
King is reminding his audience: He is not some lawless profligate; he is a minister of the gospel doing the Lord's work.
In this manner he is building his pathos and ethos.
Three. What is King's Philosophy of Justice?
King writes, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." If our fellow citizens are being subject to abuse of any kind and we are relatively safe, we have a moral obligation to remedy the injustice of others, for to only fight for our own rights is a position of moral bankruptcy and cowardice. These are the characteristics of people who are "narrow" and "provincial."
Further, evil that affects others will eventually come to us.
Four. How does King refute those critics who judge him and others for their peaceful protests against Jim Crow racism and racial injustice?
King argues: How could you be offended by us and not be more offended by the racist evil we rebuke?
How could you be so superficial as to look at the symptoms of racism but not its "underlying effects"?
Furthermore, attempts at "good-faith negotiation" have been repelled by "city fathers" even after a notorious bombing that killed four girls at a church.
Just as egregious, promises were broken regarding the taking down of racist signs on storefronts.
King makes the claim that he has run out of viable alternatives.
Five. How does King add ethos and pathos to the "direct action" of presenting their very bodies "as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community"?
King explains how they were trained in "self-purification" and nonviolence while preparing to be beaten. In this manner, they are modeling their protest after the sufferings of Christ. Bear in mind, King is a Christian minister.
Moreover, these protests, King hopes, will give the civil rights movement leverage for negotiation in the face of adversaries who have thus far lied about engaging in sincere and honest negotiations.
Adversaries of the civil rights movement are morally complacent and need a push, what King calls "nonviolent tension necessary for growth."
Additionally, King observes that only through "direct action" has the civil rights made gains in the past. Why stop now when in the absence of "direct action" the government has proven to be a non-starter, content with the status quo, with King's appeals for civil rights.
As King writes: "Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr as reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals."
Individuals can change whereas institutions are like barges; steering them is a slow process.
The status quo always says, "Wait, change is not good right now. It's not convenient."
But the waiting takes forever unless there is resistance, "tension," and leverage.
People who suffer the "stinging darts of segregation" cannot wait.
Look at this pathos: You can't tell your six-year-old daughter she can go to amusement park because she's the "wrong color." Or your child says, "Daddy, why do white people treat us with such mean disregard?"
In this context, King says it is absurd to keep waiting for justice and dignity.
Six. How does King address those critics who would say, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?"
King answers: "The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws; just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"
All Jim Crow and segregation laws, which aim to bestow entitlement and privilege on one racial group while oppressing, exploiting, dehumanizing, and demonizing another racial group, are immoral, and it is therefore our moral duty to disobey and eradicate these laws, which are a moral abomination.
King goes on to add that many of the moral laws we enjoy are the result of civil disobedience to unjust laws. For example, King writes: "To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience."
King adds that the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis were "legal," part of German's legal code at the time.
Seven. In what ways does King find greater offense in the white moderates than he does in racist extremist groups such as the KKK?
White moderates are morally complacent and cowardly, preferring order to justice, the status quo to restoring dignity to all people.
White moderates' "lukewarm" support of civil rights is worthless and a waste of everyone's time. Their support is shallow and unworthy of something as demanding as truth and justice.
White moderates' cheap lip service to civil rights creates the illusion that "something is being done" when nothing is being done; therefore, their complacency is an evil that creates far more destruction than even the KKK.
King uses a startling metaphor: White moderates are makeup concealing an infected boil. We must take off the makeup and see the boil in all its ugly grotesqueness in order to cauterize it thoroughly and remove its stench and toxicity from the body.
Eight. How does King rebuke white moderates who say it's best for black people to be patient and wait for justice?
King argues that justice is not an inevitable condition that happens naturally. It is produced by blood, sweat, and tears: by colossal struggle. He writes: "Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation."
Nine. What irony can we find in the charge that Martin Luther King is an "extremist"?
He is passionate about love, justice, and fairness, we could argue, and yet it is Jim Crow laws and racism that are the true ugly heads of extremism. To call King an extremist is to engage in the perverse manner of turning morality upside down. For racist extremist and their moderate enablers to call King an extremist is to manufacture fake news.
Essay Option Four.
Defend, refute, or complicate Martin Luther King’s justification of civil disobedience in his essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (309).
Sample Thesis in Opposition to Martin Luther King
While King makes several good points, he loses credibility by not defining exactly what he means by peaceful resistance, leaving the door open to civil unrest; he unfairly demonizes white moderates who surely are morally superior to the KKK; he over relies on biblical comparisons as a cheap way to elevate his mission.
Thesis That Critiques the Above
The above thesis has egregious misrepresentations of King's thesis. King defines peaceful resistance as nonviolent protest, nonviolent marches, and boycotting of racist merchants. He could not be more clear than that. His critique of white moderates is not "demonization" but rather a lucid analysis of what happens when white moderates enable the racist status quo through cowardly passivity and morally bankrupt duplicity. His biblical comparisons about courage, suffering, and martyrdom are historically accurate and brilliantly analogous to the social resistance King champions against the forces of evil and injustice.
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