"The Times They are a-Changin'," or so 60's singer/songwriter Bob Dylan thought. But have we really matured enough as people to say that racism and prejudice are no longer words in the English vocabulary? Most people like to think so, but the facts paint a different picture. The novel, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald can be used to illustrate these points.

In the mid-20's, when American author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, it was common to use words to describe African American people that today would be seen as offensive and degrading. Mainly the sole purpose of using such words were to depict African Americans as objects, not human beings. When Nick describes the "two Bucks" and a Negro girl passing them in a horse-drawn carriage with a white chauffeur he thinks to himself "Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridgeŠanything at allŠ" This shows how people in Fitzgerald's time reacted to free black families. Nick describes the black males as "

It was scary for me to see how similar Duke's quote and the comment made by Tom in Fitzgerald's story are so similar after 70 something years. I guess that really does show that even after all of these years, we still have not changed. I think rapper Tupac Shakur said it best when he said, "It's time for us as the people to start making some changesŠLet's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live, and let's change the way we treat each other. Because it's up to us as the people to survive."

But racism wasn't the only degrading thing in the book; characters spoke condescendingly about people's financial status as well. If you lived in East Egg, you were wealthy and glamorous. If you lived in West Egg, you were well off but not nearly as wealthy as the people in East Egg. And because Nick lived in West Egg, Tom thought of himself as the better man. "Just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are," declares Tom to Nick about his overrated ego. It wasn't only Nick who was the "outsider", Gatsby was as well. If Gatsby w

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Approximate Word count = 709
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)