ENG 101 Finals: The Language of Human Rights

In my blog about The Language of Human Rights, I would like to concentrate on the topic about how important human rights are to our lives, but also some history of how human rights were really won. I will be using all materials that I have learned from the cluster to illustrate my ideas. Human rights are the rights that we have simply by being born on earth. We are all born equal, whatever the culture we are from, or whatever our ethnicity is. But in some cases, people had to fight for their rights. For example, African Americans were not treated properly even after the Universal Declaration of Human rights was published. The UDHR is a document which protects the rights of all people on earth. The Language of Human Rights is, in my opinion, the language that we use to defend ourselves from the cruelty of some people who do not treat people fairly.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the catalyst of the black people’s battle for rights. He led marches, protests and campaigns such as the Birmingham march, The Montgomery bus boycott and the Poor People’s Campaign. Even though the black people were protected under the UDHR, they didn’t benefit from them the way white people did as the idea of white supremacy was still lively present. To summarize this point and also to connect it to other classes of this cluster, I will say that the use of language has helped black people fight for their rights. This connects to the class Law & human rights where we learn that language can be used in a specific way to fight for rights against the government using the UDHR. I remember Dr. King saying that the UDHR was like an invalid check, a check returned back saying “Insufficient funds” and that the African American people cannot accept something like this. We can also relate it to the class of Introduction to Language, which is a class where we learn deeply about language and its uses, by saying that the civil rights movement, led by Dr. King, was the use of language in order to obtain what he wanted as for example, marches, boycotts and campaigns are ways of trying to send a message to the government saying the they are not happy with the situation that they are in.

Well to connect all three classes together I could summarize it like this: Intro to language teaches us deeply about languages and their uses, Law and Human Rights is a class where we learn terms related to law and also the language we could use to defend ourselves in situations where we are illegally treated and finally ENG 101 is the class where we learned how to use English properly, for example we can see how Dr. King is in his speeches, the energy he has and also the tone that he uses to speak and to send his message, and especially to be convincing. So we can say that this is how the language of human rights work; you need to know the laws, how to use language and also how to be convincing and aggressive in order to send a clear message and to make it become effective. But the limit of one person’s rights is where another person’s rights starts.