For Homework #6, read “Remembering History as Fable by Jamelle Bouie and “It’s Time for the Lost Cause to Get Lost” and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains how some people pervert American history by turning it into a pernicious myth.
3-13 Homework #6 is due about Jamelle Bouie’s “Remembering History as Fable” and Jack Schwartz’s “It’s Time for the Lost Cause to Get Lost.” No homework for 3-18 because that day is a peer edit.
3-18 Peer Edit for Essay 2
3-20 Essay #2 Due on turnitin. We will look at essay 3 options. We will read Cal Newport’s book excerpt from So Good They Can’t Ignore You and explore the dangerous features of the Passion Hypothesis. Homework #7 is to read David Brooks’ Atlantic essay “People Like Us” and provide 3 reasons people stick to their tribe in a 3-paragraph essay.
Essay #2 Template
Variation of Essay Option Three with Thesis Template and Body Paragraphs:
Develop a thesis that compares the themes in Donald Glover’s music video “This Is America” with the theme of Jim Crow brutality in the short story “Zimmer Land.” Consult Glover’s video analysis in the following: Washington Post analysis, Time analysis, and Insider analysis. You can also include the video The Jim Crow Museum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf7jAF2Tk40&t=27s
Sample Thesis Template
The Jim Crow Museum gives us a history of the intersection of violence and entertainment that white America has inflicted against the black community evidenced in the short story "Zimmer Land" and Childish Gambino's music video "This Is America."
Points to Address in Body Paragraphs
One. Jim Crow is a minstrel character who provides racist entertainment for white people.
Two. While flagrant Jim Crow depictions don't exist in mainstream America today, white people still hunger for minstrel-like entertainment from black community in part by limiting roles they expect from the black community, preferring roles in sports and entertainment, which reinforces stereotypes.
Three. Jim Crow painted blacks as lazy and dishonest, and this dehumanization fed white paranoia and white appetite for violence against the black community.
Four. White toxic masculinity has a history of being defined by gun violence against the black community. This is evident in the story "Zimmer Land."
Five. Black stereotypes rooted in Jim Crow caricatures feeds a sick role-playing dance between the white and black community that is evident in the story "Zimmer Land" and the "This Is America" video.
Essay Thesis We Did in Class
Sample Thesis
"Zimmer Land" and "This Is America" both show how Jim Crow exists today in the form of economic caste system, gun violence, and white paranoid stereotypes.
Introduction: Write a 200-word summary of the Jim Crow Museum video.
Thesis Paragraph
Body Paragraphs: economic caste system, gun violence, white paranoid stereotypes
Economic Caste System
Gun Violence
Gun violence in US worse today than in the last 50 years
White Paranoia
The story "Zimmer Land" is about white paranoia living out its fears and fantasies. This paranoia is a reflection of what is going on in American society evidenced by this CNN list of white people reacting with fear to black people with no rational reason.
We see another Vox article, “Babysitting While Black.”
There is an epidemic of 9/11 calls complaining against innocent black people, as we see reported in CNN.
Rolling Stone has an article: “Why White Women Keep Calling the Cops on Black People.”
The NYT has article: “When White People Call the Police on Black People.”
Here’s a CNN report of the “crime” of not waving.
Here’s a YouTube video of white man calling police on black woman at swimming pool.
Here’s YouTube video of black father at soccer game being unfairly harassed.
Here is a 10-minute PBS video of white people making these racist calls.
Conclusion: Restatement of your thesis
Today's Essay Option
Option Eight:
In the context of Jamelle Bouie’s “Remembering History as Fable” and Jack Schwartz’s “It’s Time for the Lost Cause to Get Lost,” develop a thesis that evaluates the assertion that for many Americans the Civil War denies real history and replaces that real history with a pernicious mythology, often called The Lost Cause, that perpetuates the false doctrine of white supremacy.
Framing the Debate
When white people dress up in Confederate Army uniforms and do "Civil War reenactments," are they engaging in innocent, wholesome fun, or are they being morally repulsive by doing something empirically proven to be evil: denying the evils of America's slavery Holocaust by reimagining history to conform to their infantile, racist narcissism?
Moreover, are these same white people spreading racist propaganda and essentially waging a war against truth that, by any universal definition, makes them evil?
Does obfuscating (to deny or conceal facts) evil make one complicit with evil?
Obfuscation is a variation of BS, a topic made into a book by Harry Frankfurt.
Obfuscate is to make something unclear often through dishonest methods and willful neglect of facts:
Denial or neglect of facts and obfuscation of evil, such as the Holocaust of Slavery, is to commit evil. Therefore, an "innocent sunny parade at the park with people celebrating their Confederate roots, their family honor, and their grand old way of life" is to commit BS, obfuscation, and evil.
These paraders are rubbing people's faces in evil while denying the core historical fact of the Civil War and the motivations of the Confederacy.
Racist Gaslighting
White Confederate apologists were some of America's first gaslighters, people who reverse the moral equation by making the good guys look bad and the bad guys--the racist apologists--look good.
Confederate apologists say, "It's not fair that people demonize us as racist. We're not racist. We are simply celebrating our white culture and the white honor of our ancestors. Slavery wasn't even that bad. But because of the brainwashing and bias from our opponents, many people unfairly criticize us."
This narrative remains popular today.
Americans who don't believe in the racist Confederacy narrative have appeased Confederate Kool-Aid drinkers since the end of the Civil War and have allowed these racist apologists to erect statues of their Confederate soldiers, raise Confederate flags over government buildings, and even make racist monuments like Stone Mountain.
Just How Sick Are These Racist Statues, Flags, and Monuments?
To give us an idea of how sick and perverted these racist statues, flags, and monuments are, we must consider this: We are the only country that allows a chunk of its population to celebrate human atrocities and evil. Other countries are either ashamed of their past sins, like Germany, which has made it illegal to display the Nazi flag. You don't see statues of Nazis in Germany.
Even evil countries don't show off their evil. They try to hide it and will deny the evil they do.
But not America. America is the only country in the world that committed the slavery Holocaust and then rubs our faces in it with Civil War reenactments, statues, monuments, and other shamelessly racist celebrations.
Gaslighting Today by Saying Real News and Truth Are Biased
We have fake news organization who use the above faulty reasoning to spread fake news by claiming that the truth is biased.
BS Matters.
BS matters because BS obfuscates evil, apologizes for evil actions, celebrates evil under a smokescreen (Northern aggression, state rights, family honor, family courage), it rubs people's faces in evil, and it perpetuates false history.
America is the only country where a swath of the population celebrates a Holocaust. No other country does this. Countries throughout the world that commit human rights violations try to hide those violations.
But American apologists for the Civil War are celebrating a Holocaust right before our eyes. No other country has a population that celebrates its historical atrocities.
Why does this take place in America? Because we've allowed Americans to smear BS on history. That is a crime. These paraders are criminals.
Marching in a parade that celebrates slavery is an A---- move.
We don't have to use the A-word even though two professors have written scholarly books arguing that no other word can describe certain behaviors as well as the A-word. I refer you to Geoffrey Nunberg and Aaron James who argue that this word captures a certain despicable type of immoral character.
Even though the A-word captures a certain type of obnoxious evil better than other words, we can use more elevated language.
People who celebrate slavery are either sociopaths or psychopaths.
Sociopaths know they're evil and they celebrate their evil.
Psychopaths believe they're good, but they are delusional because their "goodness" is really evil.
The Losers of the Civil War Relied on BS to Rewrite History
The losers of the Civil War were pro-slavery racists who committed treason and seceded from the Union. Their desire for "state rights" really was their desire for one right: to maintain the evil institution of slavery. They lost the war. But they rewrote history under a notion of "The Lost Cause."
As we read in the National Register of Historic Places:
The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, “invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.” The South had a “more generous climate” which had led to a finer society based upon “veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.” Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it.
The above is the mythology that inspires Civil War reenactments. "The Lost Cause" is an example of BS being rubbed in our face to this day.
In this BS history, the North is the enemy, the people of bias, and the South are the good people who fought with courage to preserve an honorable way of life.
BS Is Alive and Well Today
We've allowed slavery apologists to rub BS in our faces for hundreds of years. As a result, we tolerate BS to this day.
"It's Time for the Lost Cause of the South to Get Lost" by Jack Schwartz (paragraph headings my own)
Myth of the Happy Mammy Glorifies Slavery and Jim Crow
In 1923, a year after the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, the Senate voted to appropriate $200,000 for a Mammy memorial in Washington to celebrate the faithful black slaves who, according to its sponsors, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, had lived dutifully under the beneficent hand of their gentle white masters. The measure failed in the House, but not for lack of widespread support throughout the South. Had it passed, a visitor could have paid homage to the Great Emancipator and, after a short stroll, lighted upon a monument that declared Lincoln’s efforts to have been unnecessary, together with the war he led to fulfill them.
The Lost Cause Rewrites American History and White Washes the Evils of Slavery:
In this revision, the North are the "bad guys" and the South are living a noble existence.
The Mammy statue in Washington was to have been the culmination of a two-decade campaign to erect such monuments in every southern state by the UDC and its companion United Confederate Veterans, which together formed one one of the most formidable lobbying groups of the age. Their goal was nothing less than to rewrite the history of the Civil War. It rested on three main precepts: that slavery was not the cause of the conflict; that it was a struggle for Southern independence over Northern aggression; and that slaves never sought their freedom but were only too glad to be civilized under the hand of a superior race. All of this was romanticized under the rubric of “The Lost Cause,” in which a martyred South was defeated by a rapacious North solely due to the weight of numbers. The Yankees had the bigger battalions, not the better reasons.
Civil War Never Ended Because Its Ideology Lives On Evident in Racist Monuments
The South may have lost the war but in the 50 years after Reconstruction was undone in 1877, it won the second battle: an ideological struggle in which Southern apologists imposed on the national consciousness a revisionist narrative of the conflict, its causes and its consequences. Central to this enterprise, as the historian David Blight writes in his masterly Race and Reunion, was the construction of monuments that, from the mid-1880s to the mid-1920s, memorialized the myth of the “Lost Cause.” Their erection was not to memorialize, but to polemicize.
Lost Cause Erases Guilt of Slavery and Treason
They were weapons in a campaign of revisionism to erase from memory the reality of slavery as the cornerstone of the Confederacy, its expansion as the reason for secession, its enforcement as coercion, and its maintenance as the bedrock of white supremacy. The monuments were part of a successful campaign to promote the Confederate portrayal of history in the nation’s schoolbooks and to impose the Southern version as the true one. Thus, the War of the Rebellion, as it was known at the time, became the War Between the States, a conflict between two sovereign entities, such as Athens and Sparta, thereby removing the taint of treason. Most important, the strategy was used to impose and codify the Jim Crow laws that subjugated black Americans for another 75 years.
Lost Cause Wars Against Black Civil Rights
The cause of Southern revisionism was a political movement that manipulated the past to justify a present that deprived blacks of civil and political rights through terror and intimidation. It is ironic that the appeal to “preserve heritage” is now being used to justify memorials built to erase historical memory.
To be sure, the monuments are part of the American past and should not be destroyed but relocated to an exhibition space where they can be placed in their appropriate historical context. This would mean restoring them to history rather than maintaining them in a prominent public place where they serve as a symbol of white supremacy. On Memorial Day 1890, a crowd of more than 100,000 people turned out in Richmond, Virginia, to celebrate the unveiling of a giant equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee. This was the apex of a cult that would deify Lee as a paragon of Southern chivalry and glorify the cause for which he fought.
To remove Lee’s statue, as has been proposed in Charlottesville, is not to remove him from the pages of American history, where he belongs. Lee is a complex character, perhaps a tragic one. To make him a stage villain would be as wrong as to canonize him. In the antebellum years Lee had made known his distaste for slavery as “a moral and political evil,” and had argued against secession. He declined the offer of his fellow Virginian, Federal General in Chief Winfield Scott, to lead the Union Army. And when the South seceded, he chose to remain with his native state.
But it is also true that Lee turned a blind eye to the massacre of black prisoners at Fort Pillow and other such killing fields as the Crater, and countenanced the execution of black soldiers who had fallen into Confederate hands—what would be considered war crimes today. Even a plan for humane prisoner exchanges was scotched when the North insisted that it include captured blacks. And when Confederate forces under Lee’s command marched into Pennsylvania on their way to Gettysburg, they seized blacks and sent them South to slavery. As a last desperate measure, with Union forces closing in on a depleted Army of Northern Virginia, Lee proposed recruiting slaves to the Southern cause with the promise of freedom. But this measure was voted down by the Confederate Senate. To concede that blacks could fight would acknowledge their humanity, a concession that Southern die-hards, even with their backs to the wall, could not tolerate, because it would topple their edifice of white supremacy and the war to preserve it.
In 1859, the year leading up to the Civil War, Lee was the U.S. officer who captured the abolitionist firebrand John Brown after his aborted raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry to lead a slave insurrection. At his trial, Brown declared he had acted to free the slaves, a cause for which he was willing to die. He was convicted of treason and insurrection and was hanged. Not a single Confederate leader who had engaged in treason and insurrection, in a war that led to 750,000 dead, was executed after the conflict. (The only Confederate condemned was Henry Wirz, commandant of the Andersonville prison camp.) Some fled, a few served prison sentences and were honored as they emerged. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, spent his time after being released writing his memoirs in which he justified, without apology, the South’s right to secede and the justice of its cause. On his death in 1889 he was mourned throughout the South, which honored him with monuments. One is in Montgomery, Alabama, the first capitol of the Confederacy. Another, in New Orleans, was dedicated in 1911 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of secession. It was removed in May. It should be noted that Lee himself opposed the construction of Confederate monuments in the belief that it was best for the reunited nation to move on and leave behind the symbols of civil strife.
If the goal of those who kept the Confederate flame was to honor Southern military valor, we may wonder at the absence of one of the most prominent Confederate officers of the war: James Longstreet, probably the ablest Confederate general after Lee, who valued him highly, and a brilliant brigade and corps commander. Why did he become a non-person in the frenzy of memorializing? It seems that after the war, Longstreet had the audacity to transfer his allegiance to the Federal Government. He was thus considered a turncoat by those who had rebelled against the Union.
The “Grey Ghost,” John Mosby, one of the legendary guerilla commanders of the Confederacy, was similarly dismissed. His sin was to have worked for Grant’s election in 1872, and he disappeared from the Southern pantheon. Honoring Confederate heroes postwar was a selective process based on politics. As political symbols they’re fair game for the judgment of future generations.
No one is questioning the valor of Robert E. Lee, but the cause in which he served, dedicated to the expansion of racial slavery and the preservation of white supremacy.
President’s Trump concern about where it will end—Washington, Jefferson—is misplaced. The issue is not that they owned slaves, which was true of most Southern landowners in their time, and more than a few in the North. The point is that they pledged their fortunes to a revolution seeking freedom and independence against foreign tyranny. Almost a century later, Lee broke his oath to the United States and committed treason in the service of a slave power. Each man should be judged in the context of his time.
By this measure, Washington and Jefferson acted honorably and, whatever their flaws, should be honored for their service to the nation; Lee betrayed the nation, knowing full well the consequences of his actions. He did so in the service of an execrable cause. It was to sanitize this cause that Confederate memorials mushroomed in the decades after the war. The men in thrall to that cause should be remembered in history but not honored in the public square.
The second and third generation of Germans after World War II came to terms with the shame of the Third Reich and rejected the Nazi past. Whereas the second and third generations of Southerners after the Civil War sought to vindicate the Confederacy. The Germans fought valiantly at Stalingrad and tenaciously in Italy but it is because young Germans remember their history that Germany is not dedicating statues to the valor of the World War II-era Wehrmacht. Rommel and Guderian were brilliant commanders but their victories brought a swath of devastation in their wake. They belong in the history books, yes. But not on pedestals.
The sad truth is that we have never come to grips with the harsh realities of the Civil War and its aftermath. It is no accident that the onset of Confederate monument building coincided in 1890 with the first Southern law explicitly disenfranchising blacks (the Mississippi state constitution),and reached a peak in 1924, the year of the Lee Monument at Charlottesville, with the imposition of racial quotas to keep out unwanted immigrants. It was all of a piece, a unity of racism and nativism that is still with us today.
Confederate apologists and Southern historians, abetted by kindred academic spirits in the North, controlled a racialist narrative that perpetuated the Lost Cause myth in revisionist histories, polemics, tracts, texts and films, from Birth of a Nation to Gone With the Wind. The appearance of D.W. Griffith’s wildly popular Nation in 1915 celebrated the reunion of an expedient North and a supremacist South at the expense of America’s blacks who would have to wait half a century before the nation began to redress their grievances, still a work in progress.
The demons of racism that animated the antebellum South as well as the North with its black codes, that betrayed Reconstruction, that terrorized blacks in the Gilded Age and segregated them in the Jim Crow era, have never disappeared but assumed different morphologies, most recently the form of white victimization. Its current practitioners are well aware that their demands of First Amendment rights—which their spiritual forebears would never grant to others—are nothing but a ploy to incite violence, infect the national discourse and seek traction for their white supremacist ideology.
They call themselves patriots but we can only wonder what the Americans fallen on the beaches of Normandy would have thought about their sacrifice when hardly more than 70 years later, homegrown Nazis would be mocking the cause for which they gave their lives. What would the GI’s who fought at Anzio and the Bulge have made of marching neo-Nazis invoking the torchlight parades of Hitler’s storm troopers on sacred American soil—and of the sight of a sitting president and commander in chief defending them. Sen. John McCain called the racists at Charlottesville traitors. Legally, they may not be so, but in a deeper sense, they are. Traitors to what is best in America, its basic decency, its promise of hope that is greater than the reality we often see, its wager on the possibility of promise for all its citizens, and its belief in the words of Langston Hughes, that “America will be!”
"Remembering History as Fable" (short enough to read entire essay)
Excerpts
Without these voices and stories, we’re left with a narrow and impoverished portrait of the end of the war, to say nothing of the whole conflict. But that’s where we are in our public commemoration of the Civil War. And unfortunately, that’s where we’ve been for a long time.
Hostile to black Americans, tired of sectional conflict, and committed to white supremacy, white Americans, North and South, had written emancipation out of the legacy of the war and embraced a new mythology of honorable soldiers and glorious combat, a synthesis of Confederate remembrance and Northern sentiment for the Old South. Their Civil War was a white man’s fight, for the ideals of a white nation. “[I]t was slavery that raised the question of State sovereignty; but it was not on behalf of slavery, but on behalf of State sovereignty and all that it implied, that these men fought,” wrote the editors of the Outlook, a liberal magazine, in their coverage of the event. “Both sides,” it concluded, had fought for “the same ideal—the ideal of civil liberty.”
Ignored in this story of Gettysburg, and the war, was emancipation. As David Blight details in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, in the first years and decades after the war, at least in the North and among former enslaved people, black freedom was as much a part of remembrance as reunion. “They are not dead,” said a speaker of the fallen in Kenduskeag, Maine, in 1869; “The early manhood of this nation retains its majesty by their fall, and the black stain of slavery has been effaced from the bosom of this fair land by martyr blood.” Likewise, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg on July 1 of that year, Indiana Gov. Oliver P. Morton—a Union partisan—declared, “The rebellion, the offspring of slavery, hath murdered its unnatural parent, and the perfect reign of liberty is at hand.”
But by the beginning of the 20th century, this meaning of the war had faded from mainstream memory, replaced by the Lost Cause and its vision of dutiful soldiers, honorable leaders, and white supremacy. A thoroughly racist public had no interest in black memory of the war, a fact underscored by the color of the 50th Gettysburg anniversary. Few arrangements were made for black veterans of the war (nearly 200,000 freedmen and freemen served in the Union Army and Navy), and there’s little evidence of black attendance. If blacks were present, it was under the shadow of Jim Crow, as laborers, janitors, and other service workers.
Hostile to black Americans, tired of sectional conflict, and committed to white supremacy, white Americans, North and South, had written emancipation out of the legacy of the war and embraced a new mythology of honorable soldiers and glorious combat, a synthesis of Confederate remembrance and Northern sentiment for the Old South. Their Civil War was a white man’s fight, for the ideals of a white nation. “[I]t was slavery that raised the question of State sovereignty; but it was not on behalf of slavery, but on behalf of State sovereignty and all that it implied, that these men fought,” wrote the editors of the Outlook, a liberal magazine, in their coverage of the event. “Both sides,” it concluded, had fought for “the same ideal—the ideal of civil liberty.”
Slavery doesn’t touch the re-enactors’ war. Or at least, not much. “It wasn’t just [slavery]; there were many other causes, with slavery being part of it,” explained Charlie, who was re-enacting a medical officer. He “wore blue” because he believes the Confederacy was an illegal government. “I want to fight for the one that was legal.” For another re-enactor, Lorne, who played a Union soldier, the remembrance at Appomattox was about the “emotion” of the surrender for “the Southerners and the Northerners who had been fighting for so long.” “When the final shot was over, the soldiers just came together,” he said, “it was something very special.“ “They fought because they were defending their rights, defending their home—defending their way of life,” said Bill. “Were there other issues? Of course there were other issues … but both sides were fighting for their constitutional rights.”
"It's Time for the Lost Cause to Get Lost"
Option Eight:
In the context of Jamelle Bouie’s “Remembering History as Fable” and Jack Schwartz’s “It’s Time for the Lost Cause to Get Lost,” develop a thesis that evaluates the assertion that for many Americans the Civil War denies real history and replaces that real history with a pernicious mythology, often called The Lost Cause, that perpetuates the false doctrine of white supremacy.
Lost Cause Propaganda and Sample Thesis Statements
Sample Theses
Whites who re-enact the Civil War and white-wash the evils of slavery are engaging in white supremacist propaganda, what is called the Lost Cause myth or the Lost Cause Cult.
The Lost Cause explanation of the Civil War is racist propaganda that pours salts into the deep wounds of slavery and Jim Crow.
Attributing the Civil War to "state rights," "Northern Aggression," and the Lost Cause is a moral abomination that white washes the true history of slavery and the true causes of the Civil War.
BS matters. Allowing Confederate apologists to spread their fake news based on the mythical Lost Cause narrative opens the floodgates for more fake news to pollute society and make racism spread like a cancer.
Confederacy apologists who have "innocent picnics" reenacting the Civil War are showing signs of abnormal psychology evidenced by pathological gaslighting, obfuscation of the truth, gross denial of America's slavery Holocaust, and the sadism of rubbing our faces in their racist, pro-slavery narrative.
Mapping Components to Consider for Your Essay's Body Paragraphs
One. Promoting Civil War propaganda perpetuates America's divisiveness and the friction between those who take accountability for America's slavery and those who to this day whitewash or sugar coat or flat out deny the evils of slavery by saying "it wasn't that bad," "it was favorable to black Americans," it preserved America's culture of "honor and courage."
Two. Civil War propaganda that whitewashes the evils of slavery is a moral abomination that rubs its victims' faces in the horrors of slavery by the propaganda, which includes fake history and statues to the Confederate soldiers.
Three. Promoting any propaganda, including Civil War propaganda, is a war on truth, and to engage in a war on truth is, empirically speaking, to work for the forces of evil.
Four. Promoting Civil War propaganda is to pollute society with what philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt calls "bullshit." In his best-selling book On Bullshit, Frankfurt's thesis is that when we accept bullshit into our lives, the bullshit insidiously gets inside our brains and slowly steals the truth and with the destruction of truth comes the destruction of morality.
Five. We must morally condemn and excoriate these white Civil War reenactors because in the Internet age, their propaganda and bullshit is weaponized over social media, feeding racist clowns like Alex Jones, Breitbart News followers, and the Alt-Right.
Some Counterarguments You Need to Address in Your Essay Before You Reach Your Conclusion
"You're disrespecting white culture in the South, by dismissing the real causes of the Civil War, state rights and Northern aggression."
Rebuttal to the Above
"You're disrespecting my white family, many of whom belonged to the Confederacy, and who lived courageous and honorable lives."
Rebuttal to the Above
"You have a biased agenda against white people, which makes you a racist against the white race. Stop calling me a racist when you're the biggest racist in the room."
Rebuttal to the Above
"I don't hate white people. I hate BSers, regardless of skin color. That white people are showing up to these Civil War reenactments and waving their racist Confederacy flags and preaching a whitewashed history that denies that cruelty that slavery inflicted upon black Americans is a moral abomination, and I'm going to call them out on it. Don't twist the argument around to suit your needs. This isn't about me being racist. This is about me calling out BS."
Correct the faulty parallelism by rewriting the sentences below.
One. Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do; they have giant mood swings and all-night tantrums.
Parenting toddlers is difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that toddlers contradict everything you ask them to do, they have giant mood swings, and they have all-night tantrums.
Two. You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony; they feature fatty, over-salted foods and high sugar content.
You should avoid all-you-can-eat buffets: They encourage gluttony, they feature fatty, over-salted foods, and the lard everything with sugar.
Three. I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absence of loud “gym” music, and I’m able to concentrate more.
I prefer kettlebell training at home than the gym because of the increased privacy, the absent gym music, and the improved concentration.
Four. To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and writing an intellectually rigorous thesis.
To write a successful research paper you must adhere to the exact MLA format, employ a variety of paragraph transitions, and write an intellectually rigorous thesis.
Five. The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the sheer abundance of rules you have to follow, and to integrate your research into your essay.
The difficulty of adhering to the MLA format is that the rules are frequently being updated, the rules are hard to follow, and the MLA in-text citations are difficult to master.
Six. You should avoid watching “reality shows” on TV because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism; they distract you from your own problems and their brain-dumbing effects.
You should avoid watching "reality shows" because they encourage a depraved form of voyeurism, they distract you from your own problems, and they dumb you down.
Seven. I’m still fat even though I’ve tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and fasting every other day.
I'm still fat even though I've tried the low-carb diet, the Paleo diet, the Rock-in-the-Mouth diet, and the fasting diet.
Eight. To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and developing a thesis that elevates the reader’s consciousness to a higher level.
To write a successful thesis, you must have a compelling topic, a sophisticated take on that topic, and a thesis that elevates the reader's consciousness to a higher level.
Nine. Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and the importance of a positive attitude are essential for academic success.
Getting enough sleep, exercising daily, and maintaining a positive attitude are essential for academic success.
Ten. My children never react to my calm commands or when I beg them to do things.
My children never react to my calm commands or my lugubrious supplications.
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