Hello Politics students,

Different style of presentation for this week. This week's work will focus on the civil rights part of the course. George Floyd's death does feel like a watershed moment in the discussion of race relations in the United States. For those of you who studied History at GCSE there are a lot of things that you have studied that are mentioned within some of these articles like Brown Vs Board of Education, Martin Luther King, and segregation. For the Geographers amongst you, you will see this through the prism of poverty, lack of services and tertiary education and employment. I have added a lot of articles. Everyday adds more to the list. They are sort of in chronological order and I would like you to read them from top to bottom. Try to read them all please. Each one is around 1000 words. 3-4 minutes maximum. What I want you to get from them all is completely up to you. That might seem facile or a cop out by me but actually I think one's reaction to this is incredibly personal. We know things are not right, how can they be when "the incarceration rate per person was six times higher in 2016 for blacks than it was for whites (and that, amazingly, was an improvement: in 2006, it had been seven times higher)." So what you produce is honestly up to you. You could write a small paragraph explaining what you found surprising to you. You could comment on what you think we should do moving forward to right these wrongs. You could even just comment on one of the articles that you read. The Obama one is excellent, as you can imagine from someone who was always brilliant at connecting to any audience in front of him. The message of his article is for young people to use their anger and passion and turn it into votes. Anyway, I have rambled somewhat. Hope everyone is well and please share your ideas and thoughts from this week's task either in an email or attached word document. I will also set-up a forum post for this week.

Take care everyone.

Mr Fowle 

Articles to read: