Alpha Theta Phi Chapter - Phi Theta Kappa - LaGuardia Community College

Luis K. Feliz Writing has been an all-encompassing passion, and being Publications Officer for Phi Theta Kappa has allowed me to do what I love every day, and for that I am truly grateful. Nevertheless, as any writer can tell you, writing is not an easy process. In fact, it is excruciating; churning a morass of incomplete thoughts into a cohesive whole is a painful process. Hence, writing requires discipline, patience, conviction, and love. I can still remember staying up all night ideas swarming in my mind, dozing off atop a mountain of crumpled paper, and coaxing the past with trinkets from bygone days of innocence in order to flesh out its lessons. For example, I distinctly remember taking out old photographs and translating the emotions onto a paper with brushstrokes of words. Or I would listen to an old Spanish ballad and recreate in my mind’s eye a family reunion. Ice cubes submerged in an orange sea of rum. My uncle’s makeshift guitar wailing and coalescing with guffaws summon...

By Luis K. Feliz History follows a trajectory that reflects the growth of individuals. Change manifests itself through the relationship of individuals to their government and their society. From the 1950s to the 1960s, the growth was apparent in the different facets of deviant social behavior. While Democratic liberalism challenged the existing codes of civility used as tools of Southern oppression, Republican conservatism bemoaned the breakdown of law and order as a consequence of the social change. The era was marked by two revolutionary outcries—one evolutionary, another reactionary. The evolutionary As early as the 1920s, the deviance from Victorian mores found subtle forms of protest through “freer association between the sexes,” the bobbed hair, changes in skirt length, and the rejection of ideals of domesticity, noted Paula S. Fass. But the turning point in the evolutionary revolution was 1958. As a prelude to the 1960s, 1958 was, according to the New York Times Book Review wri...

By Luis K. Feliz Though he could not have put it into words, he felt that not only had they resolved to put him to death, but that they were determined to make his death mean more than a mere punishment; that they regarded him as a figment of that black world which they feared and were anxious to keep under control. -Native Son by Richard Wright The prison looms in the consciousness of the African American community as a leviathan structure of control with an overarching objective of perpetuating white supremacy. No other institution better reflects the racial power imbalances embedded in the American fault lines of historical oppression. Furthermore, the prison constitutes a significant intersection of race, power and control with roots in the antebellum South that survive today. For instance, according to Glenn C. Loury, three out of two hundred whites were incarcerated in 2000 in contrast to one out of nine African Americans. Evidently, there is a gross racial disparity between whit...