Sociology, Removal Exam

 

In the summer of 1990, I left school for a vacation and leaving behind my unfinished requirements on my subject in Freshman Sociology. During those days, it would take ten hours of travel from Marawi City to Tagum.  I was fortunate to get an aircon bus with a Betamax video player on board. It was an extra convenience offered by the bus company to their passengers while enduring eight grueling hours of  travel along the coastal roads of Northern Mindanao then.

Inside the bus, we were treated with a historical movie  entitled Mississippi Burning. Starred by Gene Hackman, the movie depicts the hard life of the newly-emancipated black people under the brutal of  dealings of White Supremacists group, the Ku Klux Klan. Set in the old Southern states, the movie was a sort of social awareness for me at that time. The woeful living conditions of former African slaves at the hands of their former plantation masters, the white folks who were unwilling to heed the call of the government to emancipate their slaves after the Civil War. 

After two weeks of vacation has ended, I went back to  school, trying to reach out my Sociology professor in the hope of redeeming my incomplete requirements in her subject. I was fortunate at that time, my kind professor waited for us her students to come back from vacation and gave us our removal examination. Upon reaching her office, she asked me to wait at her table. Passing through rows of tables occupied by other faculty members, busy making grades for their students, I waited for my examination paper to be handed out. To my surprise, our instructor announced that our removal test is an oral one. She asked me about the meaning of racial discrimination and to give an example about the social problem she mentioned.

I was stunned at first. I could not believed what I heard from our kind professor. My mind raced back to the movie I happened to see two weeks ago while on-board a bus, going home for a vacation. Mississippi Burning remains an unforgettable film that I always cherished, which gave me then fresh idea about the problem of racial discrimination. For my excellent and well-explained answer, my professor in Sociology gave me a grade of 2.0 equivalent to 90 on that removal test.