Eyes on the Prize (English

¶ … EYES on the PRIZE (English 2nd Lang)

The documentary is very hard to watch. An innocent black man is being beaten by a crowd of white people even though he did nothing wrong. The documentary is not long enough to know exactly what was the reason, but the context suggests that it was for nothing more than trying to sit at a lunch counter or bus stop in one of the segregated southern American states when it was still illegal for African-Americans to eat at the same lunch counter or wait on the same bus stop benches as white people.

The angry crowd is shouting at him and calling him "nigger" while they are beating and kicking him as hard as they can. The scene then shifts to what seems to be the funeral of another black man killed during racial unrest or during some of the bombings that occurred in Mississippi and some of the other southern states during the 1950s and 1960s when the United States was undergoing race riots and civil rights demonstrations.

It is very difficult to imagine that these types of things happened in the United States less than fifty years ago, especially with the current importance of racial equality and cultural sensitivity. As someone from a different national origin and culture, I know that at that time, many people in the United States would also have been very prejudiced against me for being of Asian descent. When I see these types of videos taken during the 1960s, I also realize that many of the people in them might still be alive.

That makes me wonder about what they think about their behavior back then. I wonder about the white men who were in their early twenties at the time who must be approximately seventy years old today. Are they still as hateful toward African-Americans today as they were back then? Do they realize how horribly they treated other people for no justifiable reason? Do they pretend they were not involved? Are they proud today of the way they acted back then? Did they ever realize that they were taught wrong? Did they teach their own children the same hate that they learned from their families and from their society back then? What do they think about black people today? What do they think about equal rights and cultural sensitivity as issues in modern American society?

I also have similar thoughts about the black people in the video because many of them are probably alive today as well. I wonder whether they ever recovered emotionally from the abuses they endured. Do they pretend not to hate white people today? Do they believe that white people today feel the same way about them as they did fifty years ago but only act differently because of the different laws today? When they see white men today who are in their early twenties, do they picture them as being the same as the young white men who tormented and abused them back then, but only behaving better because they have no choice?