Thomas Paine The Role Of Injustice In American History

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Pages: 5

Everyday, celebrities are involved in drama and scandals. It’s one of the world’s guilty pleasures, indulging in the pop culture news and picking a side of someone they don’t know and will probably never meet. Many of these “wrongdoings” are frivolous, but they often seem to center around one thing. The public condemns celebrities and other millionaires for being “out of touch” when it comes to real world, day-to-day issues that the other 99% of the population experiences. It angers people to see someone so high in social class have no connection with the “real world.” So, it would make sense that if this philosophy was still true hundreds of years ago, when the gap between the rich and poor was even wider, someone like Thomas Paine and his …show more content…
American history is littered with events of racism, sexism, and other prejudice. Slave labor literally built the country’s economy during colonial times. While this will never be an excusable part of United States history, it would be more defensible if America wasn’t still drowning in racial prejudices. In recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken the country by storm. There have been protests, rallies, and even riots on both sides of the belief spectrum. People are angry with the current state of the country and they’re not willing to sit back, which clearly highlights the issues within American society. African Americans are suffering at the hands of the system, with a lack of opportunity, educational obstacles, and police brutality. It only makes sense that they are angry with the state of the country, and it most obviously counters Paine’s point that there is nothing in America to “engender riots and tumults.” Going further into inequality, take the justice system for example. In Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy, he dives deep into the flaws of the justice system, specifically when it comes to minorities and the death