"Speaking Up and Speaking Out"

As the title of the online column suggests, the writer Melissa Silverstein presents the Incident surrounding the Dixie Chicks as "the best sort of feminist story."

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 12 Unit 4's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: How the Media Twists the News, Why Partisans View, Bush's Address on Iraq Invasion, The Dixie Chicks, Keep the Heat, Chicks Reap Whirlwind, No More Whistlin' Dixie, America Catches Up, Speaking Up and Speaking Out, Esteemed Outlaws, A Tired Old Song
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. referendum
    a legislative act referred for approval to a popular vote
    Three years into the Iraq War, the American public is making next week's election a national referendum on the policies that got us there and seem to offer no end in sight.
  2. policy
    a plan of action adopted by an individual or social group
    In a democratic culture with free speech at its core, one of the earliest challenges to those policies came from an unlikely source: three Texas-bred women called the Dixie Chicks.
  3. momentum
    an impelling force or strength
    But they put themselves squarely against the momentum growing in the country music/red state community, which was lining up behind the government's march to war.
  4. expectation
    anticipating with confidence of fulfillment
    Kopple believes women get into trouble for speaking their minds when the expectation is that "men are the ones to speak out, to take a stand, and a woman's role is to stand with her man.
  5. permeate
    spread or diffuse through
    I think these ideas still permeate our culture.
  6. rehabilitate
    restore someone to a good state of health or reputation
    Apparently to the country music world, seeming unpatriotic in a time of war is a far worse sin than being a convicted wife batterer like Tracy Lawrence, who has been able to rehabilitate himself with his fans.
  7. consolidation
    the act of combining into an integral whole
    The least discussed piece of this story is how the continuing consolidation of media into the hands of a few large corporations created a situation that allowed the Dixie Chicks to be literally erased from the airwaves.
  8. sexist
    discriminatory on the basis of gender roles
    The hate pouring onto these women was clearly sexist.
  9. moderation
    the quality of avoiding extremes
    Kopple points out an irony: "Women's voices are often considered dangerous. Ours are often the voices of change, of peace, of moderation, and of forgiveness."
  10. catharsis
    purging of emotional tensions
    Recording it and writing their own songs for the first time functioned as a catharsis for the hell they went through.
Created on Sat Mar 07 17:30:12 EST 2015 (updated Sat Mar 07 19:07:01 EST 2015)

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