American Oxygen Speech

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Catherine Beltran 2/15/2017 Enlgish 101 American Oxygen When you hear the word “Immigrant, black lives matter, equally yoked ” what’s the first thing that comes to a person's mind ? Words like alien,minority, violence, superior race and generalizing.In America we are taught from a young age to label or characterize a person or thing. America has taken a turn where we are faced with police brutality, inequality, hate crimes and racial profiling done by society itself. As an average American we feed too much into what statistics and social media tells us about the world and ourselves. The struggle of chasing the American dream fed to us by the very powers that deny it to anyone outside the dominant culture. The Rihanna song called “ America…show more content…
In American Oxygen, Rihanna focuses on how the average immigrant abroad the ocean is forced to move hurriedly in any direction to not get caught. As directly quoted from the song American Oxygen “Young girl, hustlin' on the other side of the ocean, You can be anything at all In America, America” is to emphasise the direct message the music video is trying to get across with all the shots of immigrants getting mistreated once they reach the USA borderline to the hundred of immigrants riding on top of a train. In other words immigrants are going through the nerve wrecking feeling of almost reaching their goal but as soon as they feel they touched the borderlines of America they get pushed back .The fact that Rihanna mention “Just close your eyes and breathe,Breathe out, breathe in American oxygen” throughout the whole music video is very luminous. Without the video explaining the multilayered meaning/message behind the words you won’t grasp onto what the lyrics are portraying with how the very breath that you used to breathe in the America oxygen of freedom is the same breath that imprison you as an

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