Empowerment in our Culture and Society

August Wilson's legacy starts off with how he got started as a student of culture. When he was in the 9^th Grade of High School, he wrote a paper. His teacher gave him two grades, one an A+ and one an F. The teacher said that if he can prove if he wrote the paper, he would get an A+, if not, the F. I believe that this was the turning point in his life, when this possible discrimination against color comes out, he decided to leave school and become divulged in culture. He became a playwright to not only express his diverse culture, but also to show the struggles of real life, through the jobs that were prevalent to that time area, one play for each decade, spanning one hundred years.

Now how does this interlace with what his legacy was all about? Most of these plays weren’t about fictional characters or mythical beasts, they were about the working class. Life of a garbage man was what one of his plays focused around, which is not a very common play concept, but he was able to work it in, casually citing his own experience. He also was a man of the community as was spoken in the radio show by NPR. He brought them together through the race aspect by allowing literature that would interest that time era and the races that were established. In the article (Language, power, and the performance of race and class), they speak about how race is just an “identity “, and that if we were to remove the color factor, we would all be the same underneath. He also had brought a new concept to his language when speaking in the plays, which not all people could act out during performances. This was and still is discriminated against in the past and present through how some people think that when someone is illiterate, they will not know how to doing anything job specific, or that they are just bad at their job. In the prior article, they give the idea that if you were a doctor, and are not that literate, that you shouldn’t be a doctor, which is not the case. If you do the schooling and get your PhD, then you are deserving of that job because you did the work and had the determination to get to that point. He brings power to the equation by working with the community to help the minority of America feel as if they are not left out, and that they can make a difference in society.

All in all, August Wilson changed the lives of many people, by giving them the idea to think about how the other races and cultures of society have changed the world, through the power that we can make a difference in the world, the equality of race, and the literature that we can express to change the way people perceive different races, but also to give us an idea of how to change our society to give back to culture and our roots.