If Black History Month is March, What Kind of History is it for The Rest of the Year?

I am really glad that we were able to see the end of The Night of the Living Dead. We see white cops shoot a black man without even checking to see if he is human or not. This movie is so clearly saying that we need to improve the way we treat other races. We then talked about how far zombie movies have come from that perhaps original message. World War Z for example has not message about really anything. But I quickly realized that the movie Warm Bodies was bring back this original message about how we treat each other. Warm Bodies does give a similar, but perhaps more hopeful message, that Night of the Living Dead says. In Warm Bodies, people who are uncaring, unfeeling, incapable of remorse are zombies. Have we all not been zombies for time to time? But we see in the movie that love and acceptance overcomes the dead zombies and brings them back to life. One thing that I do like about Warm Bodies is that there are different races in the movie but it does not draw attention to them. We know from class that race is real a man-made perception. The race that Warm Bodies focuses on is the human race, I know pure cheese, but it is true in this case.

As for the next idea that I want to address is the idea of assimilated appropriateness. As a linguistic I have learned that to assimilate can mean to gain positive status that is otherwise not naturally there to begin with. One example is the word awesome, which used to mean that something just had some awe or something worth looking at, now it of course means so much more. Often times when we are familiar with something, like our own race, we begin to assimilate it and even give it a level of appropriateness. This means that people different then us is a problem that needs fixing. The one line that I had to notice in X2 was when Bobby goes home and he finally tells his parents that he is a mutant, his mom then asks, “have you ever tried not being a mutant?” In X2 to be a human is normal and even right, but to be a mutant you need fixing and are dangerous. What I love about X2 is that there is more than one bad guy in the movie, we have a human who wants to kill all the mutants and we have a mutant who wants to kill all the humans. At first we are worried that all the mutants will be killed, then Magneto switches the plans and all the humans are targeted, the X-Men are Professor Xavier are the mediators and the balance in this world. It is not right to privilege or destroy either race, as it were, but it is right to save both of them.

The most interesting thing that I want to mention from our discussion about race is that sometimes the people who seem to be fighting it are doing more bad then the ones that are obviously for it. No one thinks that Kl Klux Klan is a good organization to join, but what about an organization that is bringing up racism but perhaps in an unnecessary way. I think that this is true, but I did not realize this till our class. Those who promote races like black history month can sometimes offend people and do more damage than good. If black history month is March, what history is it for the rest of the year?