The use of a bedtime prayer here in conjunction with a lullaby is really interesting. As others have noted, there is a LOT of repetition, including each line of the prayer. It's also a notable shift between tones in the song. This shift exists between several lines, but the use of it as the bridge of the song into the final chorus is a really strong command. It's just a really interesting structure and call-back to childhoods in a song that's a bit deeper than the pieces it uses.

The use of the word “Black” as a descriptor for an entire group of people should ultimately be up to them. Like they were saying, there has been a struggle to achieve a consensus on “black” versus “African-American,” but it ultimately depends on someone’s personal preferences. Breaking someone’s identity down to just the color of their skin eliminates their heritage and culture. We refer to people as Hispanic, which is an umbrella term for several similar and integrated cultures. We refer to people as Middle Eastern, or Asian, which, again, describe where they are from and the cultures that most heavily influence their lives. Even white people often refer to themselves as a citizen of the country their family is most closely associated with, like German, or Italian. We don’t break any of these people down to simply the color of their skin, so doing so to African-Americans is out of the ordinary and really can erase their culture and history. At that point, it doesn’t really matter if “black” is capitalized or not, because either way, they mean the same thing, so Rev. Jackson makes a very good point here.

Most people use some form of the gender neutral "they" in their typical speech, as I just did. When you don't know the specific gender of the person you are discussing, you use a gender neutral pronoun, like "you" or "they." It's not consciously agender, but it's so ingrained in our language that it's natural without thinking about it. The author makes a great point, that although many people consider the use of those pronouns as wrong when they are actively thinking about it, it actually isn’t noticeable in regular use. There is no real rule against it. Even if there were, rules of language change all the time. Additionally, gender neutral terms have been in use for centuries, really since the beginning of English. Some of them have fallen out of use because they were too obtrusive in text, but some, like “they,” have stuck around because they fit so effortlessly into our natural dialogue.

The fact that the issue in this case was punctuation rather than phrasing is really interesting. In many legal cases like this, where employees are seeking compensation for some neglected pay, the miscommunication is often in the language used. Most people that I’ve met don’t care as much about punctuation as they do phrasing, or just don’t care about the significance punctuation can have in meaning, so this being the issue is unusual. It makes sense that it would be, because people can generally find previously unnoticed discrepancies when extra compensation is at stake. The lawyer’s statement that, “That comma would have sunk our ship,” is also interesting because a lot of lawyers start with English degrees before entering law school, so one would think that the lawmakers passing the state law would have noticed the issue during the making of it.