In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a story is told of chained prisoners in cave that can only see right in front of them. There’s a fire that burns behind them and they perceive only what shadows they see. These shadows were all they knew and to the prisoners these shadows were real. One prisoner breaks free and leaves the cave to which he discovers the blinding light of reality. The reality he and the other prisoners had their backs turned to. The escaped prisoner realized his life was a lie and that the shadows and the voices he thought were coming from them were a great big lie. Through this Plato teaches the reader that perception is not always reality especially when that perception isn’t their own discovery rather another's forced ideas. In relation to today, the stereotypes of race, culture, and gender in the American media have played the role of the shadows that cause discrimination and judgement towards to innocent people.
Gun violence and mass shooting terrorist attacks have
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The perception of the shadow would be the worst threat to society. A wild savage who must be monitored or incarcerated for the safety of the world. Black men in the media are seldomly shown to be powerful and successful rather they are shown to be thugs and aggressive criminals. These ideas are the reason why police officers can use blackness alone to say they are threatened enough to draw their weapon upon arrest or be more physical, which led to the multiple cases of fatal police brutality against black men such as Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. The most honored black men in the media are athletes but had they not been gifted with supreme athletic talent they’d still be victim to people clutching their belongings a little tighter next to them on the train or a stop and frisk from a cop who think he sees a “suspicious