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Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

varnull.adityamukerjee.net

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Re: Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

#161

Post by tomphoolery »

I love how you equate "access" with "reading". Especially given the highly rhetoric tone of the speech, reading it to me would just be doing the whole thing a disservice. A good chunk of what makes that speech successful is his awesome use of rhetoric and repitition to get his point across. It's a really dumbass comparison but IMO Chris Rock does the same thing, he'll repeat a concept over and over to the audience in between doing jokes about the concept. I think these are two sides to the same coin, rhetoric goes a LONG way when convincing others that your words are truth in public.

We studied this speech in my high school, as well as speeches by FDR and John F. Kennedy (sidenote: why are all great public speakers referred to by the initials that make up their name? MLK, FDR, JFK, etc.). We studied the speech to learn more about rhetoric and how an orator can twist common words into powerful devices for convincing you to believe in their ideas.

Oh and by the way? we read it too. This was to emphasize how much more powerful the speech is when SPOKEN rather than read. It's really not that fun to read, the sentences are so repetitive, short and simple that it's hard to believe an educated man wrote them, but that is of course the purpose of such speeches...you speak them in such a way that the simple becomes complex and weak words become powerful.

Re: Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

#164

Post by danielweber »

chimeracoder wrote: post #71
danielweber wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools have successfully used copyrighted books all the time in literature classes without problems. You can't run it off yourself on the mimeograph machine but just go buy 30 copies and leave them in the classroom.

Of course they can. That's not the issue. The issue is that textbook publishers cannot (or will not) include the speech in their books, because then they would have to pay royalties (and indirectly pass along those costs to the schools). Furthermore, use of the video is much more heavily controlled by the King estate.

Schoolbooks are full of stuff that is copyrighted. The photos explicitly are.

We still have Norton's Antologies, right? Many of those are 100% filled with copyrighted works they need to pay royalties on. And they do. And everything works out just fine.

Re: Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

#165

Post by danielweber »

DannyBee wrote: post #132
danielweber wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools have successfully used copyrighted books all the time in literature classes without problems. You can't run it off yourself on the mimeograph machine but just go buy 30 copies and leave them in the classroom.

They have also been successfully sued a number of times for course packets, so they tend to be very careful.

So buy it. The same way they would study Shel Silverstein poems.

Re: Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

#166

Post by danielweber »

cgore wrote: post #118
gnaritas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mimeograph machine Showing your age? :)

In 2003-ish, while I was getting my BS, the professor passed out some of those funny-smelling purple sheets. I hadn't seen them since probably second grade (mid-1980's). Apparently both the copiers were broken, but there was still an old mimeograph sitting in the corner, she tried it, and it still worked.

Wow, I said mimeograph entirely as a joke, I didn't think anyone had used them this century.

Re: Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

#168

Post by king_jester »

Zimahl wrote: post #60
sliverstorm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can infiltrating the Black Panthers really be considered "anti-freedoms"? What freedoms, exactly? The freedom to be violent?

Agreed, I thought the same way. To quote the Beatles: We all want to change the world / But when you talk about destruction /Don't you know that you can count me out But when you want money / For people with minds that hate / All I can tell is brother you have to wait

Easy for John Lennon to say as a misogynist white man who had all the money and privilege in the world.

Re: Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

#169

Post by king_jester »

Zimahl wrote: post #73
e12e wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the freedom to self defence? The Black Panther party didn't magically appear out of a vacuum, to boldly proclaim equal rights and freedom from police brutality, where no oppression existed.

MLK decided to use peaceful civil disobedience following the lead of Ghandi. Peaceful protest doesn't lead to a majority backlash, whereas aggressive, militant tactics do. MLK and his movement are remembered for boycotts and protest leading to the Civil Rights Act. The Black Panthers are remembered as being violent and divisive. For all the good you do can be wiped out in one instant by a single bad.

> Peaceful protest doesn't lead to a majority backlash, whereas aggressive, militant tactics do.

Uh what!? Nonviolent protestors and activists faced tremendous amounts of violence for their activity in the civil rights movement, including being murdered. Freedom riders being attacked and having their buses attacked and burned, bombing of churches, lynch mobs, being assaulted at sit ins, etc.

> MLK and his movement are remembered for boycotts and protest leading to the Civil Rights Act. The Black Panthers are remembered as being violent and divisive.

Black Panthers were a group that was systematically attacked and dismantled by state and federal police. Further, black panthers are remembered for a variety of things, like school breakfast/lunch programs, providing community safety when the police were aggressors, and tons of political discourse, among other things.

> For all the good you do can be wiped out in one instant by a single bad.

Making villains of the Black Panther Party in media and gov't circles is heavily tied to the system racism that spurred the creation of the BPP. Trying to blame all black people for the behavior of the BPP or claiming that the BPP somehow set black people back is a hugely racist claim.

Re: Why You’ve Never Read “I Have A Dream”

#170

Post by king_jester »

Zimahl wrote: post #106
andybak wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to get confirmation of this by someone who knows more Indian history than I do but I've been told more than once that the popular narrative than independence was secured almost entirely by Gandhian non-violence is woefully oversold. There are many statues to armed freedom fighters around India and Indian Railways famously have special counters provided as a privilege for "Senior Citizens, Disabled, MLAs and…

I can't talk to the complexities of India's fight for freedom. I will say that I've worked with Indians who hold Bose in higher regard than Ghandi due to Ghandi pushing for the separation of Hindu and Muslim countries and the conflicts and deaths that caused, but that's second hand information to me. Interesting nonetheless. India's resistance to British imperialism is similar to the US response to British imperialis…

> The Black Panthers weren't doing themselves any favors within the establishment by being so militant. LBJ wouldn't have spent 5 minutes bowing to their demands but had no choice politically to negotiate with a preacher leading a peaceful, rights-driven resistance.

When you and your communities existence is under direct violent threat, you are under no obligation to be nice and to wait for the persons harming you to play nice. Even after the CRA, racism and violence, both individual and systemic, persists and is a problem of US society.

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