Personal Reflection
Dialogue in Social Justice class and this 14 week project had a strong impact on my view of society. Above all, this class made me have interests in social issues even those that are not related with my personal life directly. My professor Dr. Penick, steadily encouraged me to have questions about the hidden meaning of the social issues and find out the answer by myself. One of the things I realized is most conflicts come from a human’s desire for power and exclusiveness. That makes social classes, hierarchy, and social distance between each group, and superior groups generate privilege and discrimination in order to keep their power. That is the basic reason of most social problems. As we know, all people have the same right and dignity as a human. There is no right to trample on others’ human rights. That is why we need to keep talking about an injustice.
While I did the 14 week project, I saw many people who are a minority. People call them women, people of color, people in poverty, disabled, youth, or LGBTQ+. The surprising fact is before I knew it, I am already in some parts of them. These people just want to get fair treatment as much as others. Bryan Stevenson, inspiring activist and lawyer said, "Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it is in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are." As he said, in order to make better society, we need to fight against injustice and make voice for the unprivileged.