Hello everybody!

Today again, something different! As you maybe already know we had to make our own blog in my English/US History class to post sometimes assigments that we do in class. Because I already had my blog, I was allowed to just use this one :) That why today, I post another assignment I did last week. I will post a normal blog soon, have fun reading!

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One of the first things people ask me when they know I’m not from America is “Do you have freedom of speech in your country?” or “Is it legal to drink and smoke at a young age?” It’s always something that has to do with freedom. Freedom, a very important word in America. “Yes we can say whatever we want, because we have freedom of speech!” But how true is this freedom of speech, can you really say what you want, dress how you want and act how you want?

Back in the 1940s, there were a lot of riots around the zoot suits. The zoot suits were very popular around the Latino people (teenagers) and came from the Jazz world. They were very outstanding, big oversized suits with high waisted pants, who were worn in Jazz clubs. The Latino people who wore those were judged by their looks, because of the suits. A lot of fights started with this problem. Kids were beaten up and arrested, mistreated by the police, while they were just wearing what they wanted to wear, to have a nice evening out. Isn’t that crazy?

Another of course very important subject where we were talking about in my US history class was World War 2 and Pearl Harbor. In California was a lot of trouble around the Japanese people. America felt unsafe and wanted the Japanese citizens in camps. It was all because of their race. All the innocent Japanese people were put in camps because the fear and anger of America. We can definitely say that America was not free during this time period.

But of course a lot of things changed. New people, rules, laws and a new century. You would think that people are smarter and such bad things from the past are not able to happen anymore, but unfortunately this is not the truth. Last summer, 18 year old Michael Brown was shot by a policemen and that sparkled a lot of unrest. And this is only 1 case out of thousands. The unrest is not coming without a reason, because discrimination is still a huge problem over the whole wide world. As you can see in the past a lot of things happened based on race, but we still have to deal with this almost every single day. America is not as free as it think it is, but so is every other country. Different races, people and originalities, it’s everywhere in the world. Specially since the impact of social media is growing very fast. I think the problems, riots and bullyings about discrimination are never going to stop, even though some people may think it will.