I really liked this weeks material and topic. I have never fully recognized the power of music, as I had always kind of viewed it as another form of speech. Oddly enough, I believed that singing was just a product of the written and spoken word- just another way for people to talk. When in reality, Bezio’s podcast and the works of both Beyonce and Childish Gambino both prove that songs have a unique capability of expressing ideas. In a lot of ways, it seems as though there are some messages that will carry the most weight as a song. I think about what is said in This is America, and if you look at the content of the song, it is no different than what Malcom X, MLK, and countless other civil rights activists have been saying for a long time. However, I guarantee you that for a lot of people, This is America is the first time they really recognized their own privilege and the systemic forms of racism that Black Americans have to experience every single day. There also seems to be a great irony in the fact that the US is not willing to acknowledge systemic racism as a whole, but This is America has over 770 MILLION views. If even HALF of those people demanded justice for the murder of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, or the countless other victims of police brutality, maybe their families\/ communities would know justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I really liked this weeks material and topic. I have never fully recognized the power of music, as I had always kind of viewed it as another form of speech. Oddly enough, I believed that singing was just a product of the written and spoken word- just another way for people to talk. When in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4474,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4474"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7467,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7466\/revisions\/7467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}