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Civic Imagination

The Help

I have chosen my story to be the movie “The Help”, which is a real story set during the 60s in the town of Jackson, Mississippi. The story portrays the racism and discrimination aimed towards the domestic workers during that time and the abuse as well as the harassment they go through by their employers: “the perfect housewives”. In the age of the siege and the random arrests based on color, one woman was courageous enough to interview all the domestic workers of Jackson and write their stories into a book. This woman through her determination and courage was able to give the domestic workers their voice and make them feel how important their roles were in raising “the white babies”. The main character is the girl who does not want to get married like the rest of the housewives but instead she wants to be a writer. The other characters are the domestic workers and the housewives. It is inspiring because I have always felt extremely passionate towards people who were not born privileged because I was not and my parents were not. I understand what it feels like to not be able to speak up. My dad has been working at his dead end job for 23 years now, I don’t think he likes what he does but I have never once heard him complain. Whether it is color or finances having privilege is privilege.

The first time I watched this movie was through a random DVD that I picked up from a random store. Before watching this movie I had no idea what it was like to be a black domestic worker in a white society. “The Help” along with other movies such as “Woodlawn” and “42” changed my views drastically and made me want to become an advocate for all those suppressed voices out there. I do talk about these movies as some of the movies that have touched me the most in my life.

This story can inspire people to take action and try to be more aware towards racism and also towards the little things that they do every single day where they hurt others' feelings without even realizing it. This story touches themes of racism, color, inequality, privilege, discrimination, human rights, the importance of writing about things, insensitivty towards others and advocacy. This story was 60 years ago in the States, however we still have this exact relationship with our domestic workers in Lebanon and in Lebanon it is actually much worse than what this movie portrays to the extent that we have "employers" who have burnt their migrant domestic workers with an iron. The Nepalese domestic workers' suicide rates were 15 suicides in just 4 months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuyAt68pj3I

Racism, discrimination, inequality, privilege, human rights, poverty and advocacy.

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Contents of this tag:
6. Chef "Chef is a film released in 2014 that was written and directed by Jon Favreau who was inspired by his own career in film and love of the culinary arts to create a movie about a popular chef who needs to find his creative spark and fall in love with cooking once more. The film begins in California where Chef Carl Casper lives and works. After receiving a brutally negative review from a well regarded food critic, Carl reevaluates his job at a fancy restaurant in California. He realized that sticking to a strict menu has taken away a lot of joy from the profession he used to love. After he quits his job, Carl heads to Miami, Florida with his family because his ex-wife, Inez, needs him to watch their son, Percy, while she works.
7. Freedom Writers: Bridging Racial Divides Through Writing Freedom Writers (the movie) is based on a true story of a school in Long Beach, California. The main character, Erin Gruwell, is a new teacher at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School and placed with the students who are considered at-risk and unteachable. These students were almost entirely comprised of minorities, with the exception of one student. With such a diverse class and a group of students who had no apparent desire to learn, the film explores the real-world challenges that Gruwell faced trying to get her students to come to class wanting to learn, if they would even want to come to their classes at all. The class divides itself based on race, and fights and arguments breakout regularly. The class later finds common ground on their feelings and discussions around The Holocaust. Her students become inspired to break free from the things that originally divided them, most notably with one character speaking out against someone who she was being forced to lie for during a trial. She tasked her students with writing in a diary and then compiled those journals and writings into a collection of them all in “The Freedom Writers Diary.”
8. Sanjay's Super Team This is an animated short film from Pixar directed and written by Sanjay Patel who based it off his experiences as a child. The story revolves around a young boy, Sanjay, and his father, an Indian-American migrant. Sanjay is watching his favourite superheroes on TV while his father is praying by the shrine in the same room. His father urges him to join in the ritual but Sanjay refuses so he switches off the TV and takes his toy in order to force him into it.
11. Sailor Moon Sailor Moon is a young teenage girl that learns that she has magical powers that allows her to fight against the evils of the extraterrestrial world. She finds the Sailor Scouts, Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter. Each of them have powers that relate to the symbolism of their planet and a specific superhero outfit that they wear. Based in Neo-futuristic Tokyo the story was released in the 1990’s as a manga and then a television anime came out. It became very popular among teens especially young Asian-American girls because of where it was based although the characters were many depicted as white skin tone.
16. The Lion King
22. Emmeline the Suffragist
24. Dana G.
28. Sandokan: A Post-Colonial Coldwar Hero The plot of the novel revolves around the adventures of Sandokan - a Bornean man who lost his status, home and family to British colonialists. Embittered by his experience, Sandokan sets up camp at the island of Mompracem. From there he leads a gang of pirates under the flag of the Tiger. Together they destabilize the colonialists’ authority through robbery and violence. Steeped in the colonial period in which it was written, Salgari’s novel pitted indigenous populations against the colonial powers in ways that highlighted the evils of imperialism and celebrated resistance. As Maria Bianca Gerlich (1998, 34) observes, “Sandokan, Mompracem, and the flag of the tiger are allegories in the fight for freedom.”
30. The Diary of Anne Frank
31. The colonial city
32. My Dad
36. Maus: A Survivor's Tale
38. How the tortoise got cracks in his shell
40. Train of Hope
42. The Light at the end of a Dark Tunnel
44. The Help
53. Stephanie Q
56. The doctors' team of the Aegean sea
66. How I "Eat, Pray, and Love"
70. A Leader
80. Nick C
82. Roaring Lion
89. Tiajna A
91. Julia B. I am a third year student at the University of Maryland in the U.S. studying Journalism with a minor in French. Writing is a passion of mine, and journalism is one of the many real world applications of writing. I hope to be able to use writing to make an impact on the world through the news and help others get the information that they need in order to be informed citizens. In my free time I like to do triathlons and write poetry.
92. Zootopia: Disney's Introduction to Reality for Children
96. SkyNet: the danger of Artificial Intelligence
99. Nour H
106. Nina N.
112. The Infinite Forking Possibilities of the Future
114. Be kind to yourself
120. We are all Martín Fierro
121. Rafael DCB
128. The Myth of the Mansfield Hanging Tree
129. Ghada G.
131. Nora S
134. Equilibrium Equilibrium is set in 2072 in Libria, a city state established by the survivors of World War III. “Equilibrium” is an action/thriller movie following John Preston (Bale), an enforcement officer in a futuristic world where a regime has decided to eliminate war by suppressing emotions using a certain type of drug. Books, art and music are strictly forbidden and "feeling" is a crime punishable by death.
135. Michelle S
Contents of this tag:
3. Maus: A Survivor's Tale
5. How the tortoise got cracks in his shell
8. Freedom Writers: Bridging Racial Divides Through Writing Freedom Writers (the movie) is based on a true story of a school in Long Beach, California. The main character, Erin Gruwell, is a new teacher at Woodrow Wilson Classical High School and placed with the students who are considered at-risk and unteachable. These students were almost entirely comprised of minorities, with the exception of one student. With such a diverse class and a group of students who had no apparent desire to learn, the film explores the real-world challenges that Gruwell faced trying to get her students to come to class wanting to learn, if they would even want to come to their classes at all. The class divides itself based on race, and fights and arguments breakout regularly. The class later finds common ground on their feelings and discussions around The Holocaust. Her students become inspired to break free from the things that originally divided them, most notably with one character speaking out against someone who she was being forced to lie for during a trial. She tasked her students with writing in a diary and then compiled those journals and writings into a collection of them all in “The Freedom Writers Diary.”
13. My Dad
14. Sanjay's Super Team This is an animated short film from Pixar directed and written by Sanjay Patel who based it off his experiences as a child. The story revolves around a young boy, Sanjay, and his father, an Indian-American migrant. Sanjay is watching his favourite superheroes on TV while his father is praying by the shrine in the same room. His father urges him to join in the ritual but Sanjay refuses so he switches off the TV and takes his toy in order to force him into it.
19. Train of Hope
21. The Light at the end of a Dark Tunnel
24. Emmeline the Suffragist
25. The Diary of Anne Frank
29. A Leader
33. The Help
36. How I "Eat, Pray, and Love"
37. The doctors' team of the Aegean sea
42. We are all Martín Fierro
Contents of this tag:
1. The Help