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The Civil Rights Movement Of The United States

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Institutions (such as schools, prisons, hospitals, churches, military, mass media, etc) are all collective systems meant to dictate how the masses who believe in and follow them, live and act. Each institution has its own collective set of rules, often times mostly unspoken, to guide what others in the institution should be doing in terms of right and wrong. But these rules are never fixed and may fluctuate with changes in leadership or environment among other things. The fluctuations of these rules mean that they must often be tested by people more on the fringe of the institution in order to determine where the heart of the institution stands at any given moment. That testing of boundaries, in and of itself, constitutes deviance and helps to explain how institutions meant to discourage it accidentally encourage it. Probably the most recent, relevant example of this on a societal level would be the various social movements that have swept through the country in recent decades with the most notable three being the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the marriage equality movement. As the previous generations got older, the younger generations decided to test to boundaries that were currently put in place by the rest of society and go “you know, blacks/women/gays are alright, we should stop unjustly persecuting them.” We as a society may still be working on those notions but the point is that those beliefs were once considered deviant and the activists were

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