Tyler Fred's Homework 2

In Everything’s A Text by Dan Melzer and Deborah Coxwell-Teague I found one hotspot that really grabbed my attention. It is from “Excerpt from a Malcolm X speech to the Nation of Islam” (Dan Mezler 12). In this speech Malcolm X is speaking to his Islamic brothers about the injustices of “White America” and how it must “pay for her sins against twenty-two million negroes” (Mezler, Teague 12). Now what stood out to me was how Malcolm X was repetitively referring to America in a feminine sense. This only stands out because he is speaking with a group of Islams and in the Islamic culture women are viewed as inferior. They have few rights and are expected to follow their husband’s demands. Malcolm X is using his audiences view towards women to gain support for the idea that an inferior entity, White America is oppressing the African-American community and needs to be punished for “her hypocrisy and her deceit” (Mezler, Teague 12). Another hotspot I found was the Coca-Cola advertisement from the 1980’s. African-Americans gained numerous civil rights and finally had some equality by the 1980’s and I just thought it was interesting that Coca-Cola used this equality in an ad showing both a black and a white man enjoying a refreshing Coke together.

One hotspot I found in chapter one of the Pearson Custom Library English Mercury Reader is where they describe the difference between a thesis statement and a thesis question. All through high school it was drilled into me that a good paper needed a good thesis but after reading this it seems that a good paper may instead need to address the thought provoking question that spawned the thesis statement. If this thesis question “propelled the writers thinking”, then it’s very possible that it may propel the readers thinking as well. Even if the question leads the reader to a different conclusion than the writer, it still engaged them into the paper and made them part of the solution to the question.