"The 60's" by Mark Piznarski

So if you haven't read my recent post about the 1960s, please do so. Here is the link: http://jeanettemarquez.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-happened-1960s.html

So, like I said, I'm going to adapt the next two types of discrimination into the mini-series "The 60's" directed by Mark Piznarski; and these are racial and gender discrimination.

Let’s start with racial. In the movie we are presented with two families and one of these are the Taylors. The Taylors are an African-American family, and we are presented with a son, Emmet, and his father, who is a minister in a church. His father was a pacifist activist of the civil right movements. He believed that they could achieve their goal by being calmed and pacific, and showing the world how even when they weren’t being aggressive, “white” people still harmed them, and sometimes even killed them. We can see how the father gets beaten up at the beginning by sitting down in a “white” café, trying to make a difference. This is because “white” people didn’t believe that “black” and “white” could be at the same place, because “black” people were “less” than “white” people. Because of this and more discrimination to black people, Emmet believes the best way to stop “white” people, and prove them they could also be like them, was violence and creating a riot. We can see later in the series that this turns into a bad ending, since it gets the dad killed by mistake because of Emmet’s act of rebellion.

Next I’ll be talking about gender discrimination. Like I said before, there were two families. I already talked about the Taylors, now I’m going to talk about the Herlihys. The Herlihys were a normal “white” American family, with a housewife, a veteran, three children (one girl and two boys), and raised in a religious manner. What I’m going to talk about is the mother, the daughter and one of the son’s girlfriend, called Sarah. Ok, so I wanna be brief so sorry if I let things out. First of all, we have the daughter, Katie, who doesn’t like to follow the rules as to what a woman and girl should do, so she sneaks out to a party and sleeps with a musician. After this, she gets knocked up and her father accuses her of not doing things the traditional way, and how he was ashamed of her. So she decides to leave him and raise her baby on her own. For this, she seeks the help of the father, which really doesn’t help much, but at least haves a place where she can live and people will help her take care of the child. I believe she was brave, to go out to the world and do things by herself, considering this was an era where women didn’t had much power. Let’s continue to talk about her mother. This woman was a typical mom, who cooked, stayed home, took care of the children, and contributed to everything her husband did. We can see how she takes a stand against him when she decides to sign the petition her son was asking, that was to bring the troops homes and stop the war. The husband tells her how can she do that when he does not approves of such thing, but she lets him know how she respects his opinion but he also has to respect hers. For me this is very important, since women had little voice in this decade. Talking about women’s voice let’s talk about Sarah. Sarah was an activist against the war. So, she loved when this brave man stood in front of a bus to make a stand and had lots of good ideas to stop the war and human rights. We can see later on how, he treats her like a shadow and she can’t stand this because she wants her voice to be heard and that people take her seriously for who she is, not for the man she stands behind.

I know I could’ve go in deeper, but right now that’s all I can think of. I hope you could understand how discrimination affected in this decade, and be clear that there were more types of discrimination than the ones stated above. Thanks for taking the time to read!