The Idea of Progress - Oral BAC

I’d like to present the notion of Idea of Progress. In my case, Idea of Progress is the will to improve different fields : technology, medical, political, and social fields in order to develop society. In class, we studied a work of art by the painter Norman Rockwell named The Problem We All Live With, released on January, 14th 1964. Then we’ll see that this painting is linked with a big figure we’ve studied last year in class : Rosa Parks. Indeed, both are related to black people segregation and they fight by their own actions against this huge problem which is racism. We may wonder what the two people did to try to reduce inequalities towards black people. Finally, I’ll give you my opinion.

First, we’re going to talk about The Problem We All Live WIth. This painting represents a little black girl named Ruby Bridges going to school surrounded by four white policemen representing the State (of America in that case). We guess she’s going to school because she hangs a ruler and copybooks. In the background, we can see two super racist symbols : the word nigger which is the most offensive and the worst word to describe a black person and, the letters KKK meaning Ku Klux Klan which is an illegal supremacist terrorist group, they’re against black people. So, we can say this piece of art spreads an important message : the changement. In fact, the policemen representing the State symbolise the fact that the State, so the President, agrees with the right of education for black people, things that were forbidden before. He wanted to make their lives better and also permit them to get educated to access high school and finally have the work they deserve. Consequently, having a job permits to reduce inequalities and the feeling of being rejected by society.

Norman Rockwell used art to spread the message he wanted people to understand but Rosa Parks, an activist woman, used herself to try to change the rules. Indeed, in the 60’s in the USA, the bathrooms and the buses for example were separated in two parts : one for black people and one for white people. We’re going to talk about what Rosa Parks did when she was in the bus. She was sitting in the back side (“her” side) of the bus and there were no seats anymore in the front side for a white person. So, this white person decided to ask Rosa to lend her seat but she refused, and that was totally forbidden because white people had privileges at this moment. By doing this, even if she had to be incarcerated, she wanted to change the things and show they’re not that different, they all are human-beings and each one has rights and should be respected by other people.

To conclude, we can say they both are engaged in this case and they make it possible to make the World and black people's lives much better. In other words, their idea was to make the World and the society progress.

They succeed but there’s always the problem of racism, and what is encouraging is that nowadays, people continue the fight.

And as Rosa Parks said, “You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right”, meaning you should do what it seems to be correct according to you.

...