Something that struck me is when Snead says our society today has a “need for repetition”, a majority say they want change and equality for everyone when in reality they want it, if it benefits themselves and if the parts they liked about the culture before has remained unchanged. Our culture is our identity, so when we start to alter the fabric of our society we begin to alter ourselves. We begin to feel content and happy in this social bubble and when it bursts, unhappiness and civil unrest ensues. To avoid this we strive maintain this feeling of comfort and being content that we mistake for happiness “through a perpetual repetition of apparent consensus and convention that provide a sense of security, identification and rightness”. Progress just for progress’ sake should be done away with as well as the denial of changes that need to be made but don’t only because a large group of people won’t be impacted by them or may even be unhappy with them.
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Your response here begins to get into questions of how democracy works: is it the will of the people, of the majority of the people, of the most powerful people, etc. etc.? As part of exploring that, I’d like to encourage you to pay close attention during the course to how group identities get composed and complicated – who counts as “we” or “our,” for example? (In Black Panther terms, who is Wakandan?) It’ll help to steer away a little from generalizations about “people” (any time that abstract noun starts a sentence, your reader will be asking “Which people exactly?”) and focus more on specific instances of change/resistance to change, whether or not falling along ethnic lines (e.g. access to bathrooms according to gender).