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Personal reflective essay on art
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Clarissa Sligh is known as a visual artist who photographs the change, and transformation of different parts of history. Sligh’s artist book, “It Wasn’t Little Rock,” focuses on her experience with segregation. In her photographs, she incorporates her personal experiences and viewpoints and add layers to meaning by using text, borrowed images and new images. Sligh incorporates her personal viewpoints and experiences into her work. When Clarissa Sligh was 15 years old, she was the lead plaintiff for a school desegregation case. Her photographs in the photo series, “It Wasn’t Little Rock,” incorporate the idea of the struggle that African American students had to live with each day. Also, there is repetitive use of the red chair which contains
Heather O’Neill, an inspiring author, wrote Lullabies for Little Criminals that guides readers through the prostitute life of Baby. It instantly became a bestseller worldwide in 2007. O’Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screen writer, and an essayist. She was born in Montreal and was raised in a French family. Due to poverty in her lower class neighbourhood, young adults would not graduate high school or go to university. Young women would easily become prostitutes and live the rest of her life with an older adult male. However, O’Neill was lucky to attend McGill university, a renowned university that accepts higher class students.
Students were assigned this essay as an inside look at oppression and racism from the last one hundred years, told by two elderly ladies in the book, Having Our Say. 100 Years of Degradation There are several books that have to be read in English 095. Having Our Say is one of them. My advice is to read this book while you are still in 090 or 094, just to get the advantage. These are some things that you will discover in this extraordinary biography. This book is tough to take as humorous, because it’s heart-wrenching to look at racism in America, but Having Our Say, manages to pull off the feat. Having Our Say really makes you think and tries to somehow reflect on the past as if you were actually there. As a white male, I am amazed at how these two African American sisters were able to live through over one hundred years of racism and discrimination, and then be able to write about their experience in a humorous, yet very interesting way. Having Our Say chronicles the lives of Sadie and Bessie Delany, two elderly colored sisters (they prefer the term colored to African-American, black, and negro), who are finally having their say. Now that everyone who ever kept them down is long dead, Sadie and Bessie tell the stories of their intriguing lives, from their Southern Methodist school upbringing to their involvement in the civil rights movement in New York City. Sadie is the older, 103 years old, and sweeter of the sisters. The first colored high school teacher in the New York Public School System, Sadie considers herself to be the Booker T. Washington of the sisters, always shying away from conflict and looking at both sides of the issue. Bessie is the younger sister, 101 years old, and is much more aggressive. A self-made dentist who was the only colored female at Columbia University when she attended dentistry school there, Bessie is the W.E.B. Dubois of the sisters, never backing down from any type of confrontation. As the sisters tell the stories of their ancestors and then of themselves, and how they have endured over 150 years of racism in America, they tend to focus mainly on the struggles that they encountered as colored women. Bessie brings laughter to the book with her honest, frank, and sometimes, confrontational take on life.
Hutchinson, Louise Daniel. Anna J. Cooper, A Voice From the South. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981.
During the 1950s, African Americans struggled against racial segregation, trying to break down the race barrier. Fifteen year old Melba Patillo Beals was an ordinary girl, until she’s chosen with eight other students to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. They are named the Little Rock and fight through the school year, while students and segregationists are threatening and harassing them. Warriors Don’t Cry—a memoir of Beals’ personal experience—should be taught in schools because it teaches students to treat each other equally and to be brave, while it also shows the struggle of being an African-American in the 1950s. Another lesson taught in the retelling is that everyone can make a change.
Although there were numerous efforts to attain full equality between blacks and whites during the Civil Rights Movement, many of them were in vain because of racial distinctions, white oppression, and prejudice. Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi recounts her experiences as a child growing up in Centreville, Mississippi. She describes how growing up in Mississippi in a poor black family changed her views of race and equality, and the events that took place that changed her life forever. She begins her story at the tender age of 4, and describes how her home life changed drastically with the divorce of her parents, the loss of her home, and the constant shuffle from shack to shack as her mother tried to keep food on the table with the meager pay she earned from the numerous, mostly domestic, jobs she took. On most days, life was hard for Anne, and as she got older she struggled to understand why they were living in such poverty when the white people her mother worked for had so many nice things, and could eat more than bread and beans for dinner. It was because of this excessive poverty that Anne had to go into the workforce at such an early age, and learn what it meant to have and hold a job in order to provide her family. Anne learned very young that survival was all about working hard, though she didn’t understand the imbalance between the work she was doing and the compensation she received in return.
Gloria Naylor, as an African American, has deep connection with her southern roots and heritage. The element from her life that has been most influential on her novels is her southern heritage. Understanding that southern life in many ways defines the African American experience, Naylor feels obligated to capture this essence in all of her works. Though she knows that every black experience is not southern or working class, she affirms the southern space as an inescapable foundation. According to her-
The novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett is a New York Time’s bestseller, and with good reason. This work explores and uncovers numerous amounts of topics other books and writers would shy away from. Such as, but not limited to, racism, discrimination, prejudice, and segregation in the South during the nineteen-sixties. It also examines the lives of multiple characters including Skeeter Phelan, a writer determined to expose the hidden lives of the black maids in her community, Minny Jackson and Aibileen Clark, two colored maids living in Jackson, Mississippi during this time period. In addition to that, this novel helps create a sense of clarity and understanding of the lives of the colored in the early stages of the Civil Rights movement. Also, this work contains numerous important plot points that help reel readers in, creating a whirlwind of events that anyone would be interested in. However, none of this would be important without the location this novel takes place. Being the south, Mississippi provides the perfect setting to help add more roadblocks to the quest of three women against the world.
Nikky Finney was born in 1957 in a small city on the coast of South Carolina. Daughter of the first African-American Chief Justice from South Carolina and a school teacher, she was a “nose-in-book daughter,” reading and writing poetry (“About Nikky”). Her work is a rich cocktail of her parents’ histories, and
During the early part of the 20th century, White-America fed and thrived off the established institution of racism. Although the physical bondage of slavery had ended years before, social chains still confined the African American public to a lower level of society, making it hard for them to climb to the peak that is equality. From areas where the most oppressed lie, however, some of the most beautiful art emerges. Movements in black culture such as the Harlem Renaissance provided an outlet for the struggles faced by those who were stepped on by society, and Lucille Clifton’s poem “in the inner city” exemplifies artist’s ability to analyze their situation and transfer thought and emotion gracefully into word. Clifton’s use of free verse to
All through the mid-1900s, numerous African American subjects were still not secured equal rights inside America. A crisis in 1954, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus resisted the decision of the Supreme Court's choice to put an end to isolated schools illustrated the profound segregation (Melba Patillo Beals 1). One individual who strived to roll out an improvement, and end isolated schools was Melba Beals. She and eight other of her companions, known as "The Little Rock 9”, went to an all-white school, making an enormous, dynamic, venture advance in the Civil Rights Movement. Beals confronted angry, white mobs oppressing her day after day, despite these obstacles she still managed to go to school, in this manner making
The theme of the song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by The Band is surviving defeat. The speaker of the song, Virgil Caine has determination, he swears that he will stand his ground and not be defeated; “I swear by the mud below my feet, you can’t raise a Caine back up when he’s in defeat”. Virgil Caine is a soldier in the Civil War who returned home after the defeat of the South. He feels grief because he lost his older brother in the war, “And like my brother above me”, “a Yankee laid him in his grave”. Despite his loss he continues to be a hardworking man who is proud to continue in the footsteps of his father and work the land as shown in the lines “Now I don't mind choppin' wood, and I don't care if the money's no good” and
The early 1900s was a very challenging time for Negroes especially young women who developed issues in regards to their identities. Their concerns stemmed from their skin colors. Either they were fair skinned due mixed heritage or just dark skinned. Young African American women experienced issues with racial identity which caused them to be in a constant struggle that prohibits them from loving themselves and the skin they are in. The purpose of this paper is to examine those issues in the context of selected creative literature. I will be discussing the various aspects of them and to aid in my analysis, I will be utilizing the works of Nella Larsen from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Jessie Bennett Redmond Fauset, and Wallace Brown.
Kara Walker’s piece titled Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b 'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart represents discrimination on basis of race that happened during the period of slavery. The medium Walker specializes in using paper in her artwork. This piece is currently exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. Even though this artwork depicts slavery, discrimination is still an issue today in America, the country where people are supposedly free and equal. Even though slavery ended in the 19th century, we still see hints of racial discrimination for African Americans in our society. Walker uses color, image composition, and iconography to point out evidence of racial inequality that existed in the
Rationale for Topic: The Caged Bird represents the struggle against racism. I want to stress the idea of how racism and segregation has influenced African Americans during that time period. My topic needs to be examined, because through all the criticism Maya recreate herself and strives to break the stereotypes thought about her. During the time period that Caged Bird was set in the early 1930's to late 40's, segregation was more complete and evident, especially in more southern-most states like Arkansas and an abundance of racism.
...However, this encouragement does not come without its own cost, as is illustrated in Walker’s “Everyday Use” as Dee, who has been well educated and achieved a standard of living comparable to that of the white urban middle class, loses some of her deep connection to her cultural heritage, a heritage that is an intrinsic part of her sister who lives in it every day. The constant struggle of the black community to better its condition at the same time as it retains a close connection with its cultural past is thus a constant theme throughout black literature.