What is citizenship? By definition by google citizenship is “the position or status of being a citizen of a particular country”. Meaning, it is when a person is living within a country. Citizenship is so much more, it involves voting, abiding the laws and helping a fellow citizen. A reading that challenges what citizenship is “The Awakening of Colin Kaepernick”. He shows what citizenship is by engaging in his rights and protesting on a public forum. Organizations like KIPP are another source of citizenship by giving underprivileged children the access to good education and a future.
Kaepernick was a football player in the NFL. He protested by kneeling during the National Anthem, this protest was for “Black Lives Matter” and police brutality. In his protest he was keeping himself educated on his country and continued to research about civil rights and the black movement. “He was willing to work and study to kind of understand what was happening with his teammates, with other people, and how this whole thing rolled out over 400 years,” Edwards said (Awakening). Its important to stay educated in our country because we have a say and a right to change our country and that is what he did. Education is a key factor in citizenship because there is so many layers of what citizenship is.
Citizenship is shown through protest and using you born rights like Kaepernick and also bettering your country and trying to improve the population, KIPP schools are doing just that. They are for the lower class citizens so they can stay on pace like the rest of the upper and middle class kids. The school was founded in “1994” by “Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin”, their motivation to start the schools was for bettering the poverty level cities. The school became more popular and got a 15 million dollar grant to spread the schools to other cities. Their contribution to the country was astonishing and was put into the book the Outliers. In the book it has a table that shows how the academy has impacted the lower income community and the guarantee the students make it to secondary education. Their citizenship was shown in action and has been a positive movement in the United States.
A way we can show our citizenship is through our activism in our community through voting. November 6th was election day in which many young people set a record of be active in the polls. “33 million Americans” have voted for early elections. That is more than “22 million” more than than the election in 2014 according to CNN. It is part our citizen duties that we vote. Our vote is our voice being heard and it is so important as a law abiding citizen to vote. In countries like Pakistan they do not have a democracy like the United States and do not have the right to speak their minds. In North Korea they have propaganda that the government sets up, they are silenced through death and harsh conditions. We are lucky and blessed to have a government where our voices and be heard, and that is why it is so important to vote: important to be a citizen.
Work Cited
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/05/politics/early-voting-as-of-monday-morning/index.html
Maddys Thoughts 