Peripheral

A MEmorial peripheral is something that “honors sacrifice for an acknowledged community value.” For example, let’s take the Lincoln Monument where the March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place and where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.” This location signifies the pursuit and determination for equality. When people gather around this monument they are not only reminiscing about the speech that turned heads and made a breakthrough in our society, but they are also thinking about the millions of occurrences that happen every day concerning deaths based off of race.

A great way to get a collective view of people to look back on this pivotal speech each day would be to project a digital screening of the speech at that building everyday. If we reviewed this speech and people kept seeing it repeat itself, I think it would encourage people to look at everything in a new perspective. They would tell their friends about it and it would circulate around the web constantly. This would help create that effect of a public participation and really make people think about how they act with others on a day to day basis. If we had a circulation of popular cultural forms of media move around the web constantly, it would heighten our senses of what is going on in present day. If the screening went on every time there was a death based off of racial profiling or any stigma related to that topic, the screening would play consistently. This would definitely help bring awareness to the community and create a system of networking and socialization.

I also think that if people had a better education on issues of race and weren’t taught to neglect or treat others different because of race, class, gender, etc. our community would improve drastically. A lot of people are grown up to think a certain way about specific people and we should NOT be taught this. We should believe that everyone should be equal no matter what their physical appearance is. In regards to shootings that have happened recently, I think White policemen should have a greater understanding of all different types of people and should not determine if a criminal is in the wrong based on their skin color. I think the major thing all around that people need to brush up on is their education toward society as a whole.