Research Papers

So for the past week or so, I've spent quite a good amount of time pondering the research papers we have been assigned for AP Composition. Last week I was basically trying to think of something, anything to write about. What is my original argument? Is any argument original, really? Think about it, I'm sure there's someone somewhere in the world that has had the same thought as you about a certain topic. They may not have written a paper about it, but chances are that somebody had the same idea.

Anyway, after much painful mulling over several different avenues down which I could take this project, I finally decided a couple days ago what I would write about. Basically my argument is that throughout time in America, laws have been enforced based on gender, social class, and race rather than being enforced uniformly. The more I started thinking about it, the more interesting the topic became to me. And even more so once I started researching it. I found a court case called Muller v. Oregon that took place in 1908, and this particular court case legalized sexual discrimination in the work place. How can that possibly be legalized-- it's discrimination? The fact that discrimination could be legalized is ridiculous! I mean, I do realize that a good amount of discrimination occurs every day, and a lot of the time the people doing the discriminating are let off the hook like nothing ever happened. So I guess some people would argue that by not making discrimination illegal you are essentially saying that it is legal. But, I'm not quite sure that's the case either. It's a rather difficult situation to ponder.

So how exactly do you go about making discrimination illegal? Yes, it is illegal for store owners to stop African Americans from entering their stores like they used to in the 60s, and it is illegal for companies not to hire someone based on his or her race, but how do you patrol it? An African American person can apply for a job and not get the job, but is that to say that he or she didn't get the job solely because of the fact that they're black? Maybe there was a white person who was more qualified and had more experience? On the other hand, maybe the black person didn't get the job because they were black. But how does the black person prove that the company didn't hire them because of that? The company will always have millions of excuses to fall back on.

So I went off on a rather long tangent there, but my point of this was to state that although the research paper is a lot of work, I think it is kind of an interesting assignment. It's something I've never had to do before-- creating my own original argument, and I think that I might actually learn something from this paper.