Metamorphosis of Sisyphus

Kirill Bedenkov
8 min readJun 21, 2022

or institutional responses that can most effectively reduce racial prejudice

Image credit: Jeffrey Hummel

“And I saw Sisyphus in agonising torment trying to roll a huge stone to the top of a hill”

The following lines were introduced by Homer (2004, p.593) in his epic “Odyssey” depicting the eternal cyclical punishment of Sisyphus. This myth became associated with moral doctrines which accentuate the critique of the human vices, where Sisyphus mirrored the hideous consequences of the deceit — being portrayed as an anti-hero. However, what if a different perspective is introduced, where Sisyphus is seen as a tragic hero of a story instead?

During the vibrant American modernity, racial inequality embodies a subject that continuously pulsates in the veins of a polarized society. The concept is stigmatised as a redundant outcome of political correctness. Nonetheless, the annually presented statistics represent the antidote to such scepticism. According to the data from the Brookings Institution, in the US Senate and House, “1 in 5 lawmakers in the 116th Congress is a person of color and nearly 8 in 10 are white” (Dzhanova and W. Schoen, 2020). Furthermore, approximately 1 in 1,000 Black American men and boys are killed by the police over the lifetime, compared to 39 per 100,000 for white men and boys (Edwards et al., 2019). Additionally, 8 in 10 Black American students report…

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