Racism

One sentence that summarizes economics is, "there's no such thing as a free lunch." Sure, anyone can have a lunch and not pay for it, but it still is not free. Everything costs something to someone. Even if you don't pay for your lunch, someone will, whether it be your lunch partner, the restaurant manager, the owner, or the people who supply the raw materials to make that food. Everything acquired by a person or a community is accompanied by a price, monetary or not. Jaime Fox said, "Ain't nothing in this world for free, and it blows my mind how many fools just don't get that." I agree with this statement. Many forms of literature, such as Martin Luther King's speech "I Have a Dream" and "Learning to Read and Write" by Fredrick Douglas, have documented the high price paid for freedom and basic human rights; they show that even freedom, where the root word is "free", has an expensive tag.

Usually, when we think of something as being free, we associate it with money. I believe Jaime Fox's statement can be applied to so much more than "bought" materials. For many years, African Americans and other minorities have been fighting for freedom, a right that has been won with hard work, spilled blood, broken bones, and tears. This is the ultimate price tag. In Dr. King's speech he claimed that by signing the Constitution and the Declaration of independence, the "architects of our republic wrote a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men--yes, Black men as well as white men--would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned" (447). He urges his audience, of both white and black citizens, to fight for these rights promised to all Americans. "We have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice" (448). He insists that they fight with their minds and not their force. Dr. King and all those who listened to him, who fought with him, who put their lives in danger with him, they, put the down payment on endless lease we have taken out on freedom.

Although Dr. King's discussion of freedom has affected everyone in America personally, his address of freedom was on a larger scale, reflecting on its cost to an entire culture of people and the benefits of paying that cost. It is ironic that if anything in the world were to be free, it would make sense that the right to pursue happiness, the liberty to walk into a public restroom, and the right to vote would be amongst those things. They are not. These liberties cost the lives, integrity and happiness of many people that came before us. He addresses this in "I Have a Dream," "some of you have come from where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive." Here, Martin Luther King, is painting the price of freedom. It cost suffering. It cost faith, and it cost perseverance. No, nothing in this world is free, not even the basic conditions that should be granted to a person by just being alive.

Fredrick Douglas, another advocate of freedom, has also written about what it cost him to be free. Unlike, Dr. King, his discussion on the costs of freedom are more persona, he explains how he obtained the freedom to read and write. As a slave, his mistress taught him to read and write, a practice highly forbidden at the time because it is a form of freedom. When a person learns how to read or write, they has the freedom to acquire information and express opinion. He describes his mistress as having been "tender hearted" and "that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me" (148) Soon, she lost this trait, and began treating him according to the norms of the time. "Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper" (148). Blacks, at that time, did not even have the freedom to learn to read and know about politics and basic information. It was a luxury reserved only for the white, and only acquired for everyone through suffering, fighting and death.

Although Douglas mistress did not teach him much, he matched the price he needed to pay to learn how to read and write on his own. "I