For the purposes of this assignment, I had the privilege of interviewing an incredibly talented person by the name of Cynthia Jeanette Hyatt, who graciously granted me a last-minute interview after an incident with a previous interviewee rendered that interview borderline unusable.This is not to suggest that choosing her for an interview was merely a matter of convenience. While that did indeed play a role in her initial consideration, the opportunity to interview her was truly appreciated and ultimately enjoyable. Due to busy and conflicting schedules, the interview was conducted in the common area of the high school at which the interviewee works and the interviewer attends. There were a couple gaps throughout the interview, during which the conversation was turned to another person or became tangential, but overall the interview was fairly cohesive. Born Cynthia Jeanette Weaver, she grew up in the middle of the city of Detroit, Michigan. Multiple times over the course of our interview, she referred to her neighborhood as one that was predominantly Jewish and incredibly diverse, and indeed, her experiences, not to mention her home life, seem to have reflected that claim. Her family, as well, was very diverse; her father was African-American, and her mother was part Cherokee indian. This in fact caused her some problems throughout her …show more content…
Anything more is extravagance, anything less and you’re from the slums. Cynthia Hyatt grew up in the city of Detroit, Michigan, in an ethnically diverse and predominantly Jewish community. She had many of the ‘typical’ childhood experiences- family trips to the local Dairy Queen, and picnics, weekends out with her family and the like, but all of these experiences were flavoured by her
Hodes, Martha. "The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story." The American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (February 2003): 84-118.
Anne Moody’s memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, is an influential insight into the existence of a young girl growing up in the South during the Civil-Rights Movement. Moody’s book records her coming of age as a woman, and possibly more significantly, it chronicles her coming of age as a politically active Negro woman. She is faced with countless problems dealing with the racism and threat of the South as a poor African American female. Her childhood and early years in school set up groundwork for her racial consciousness. Moody assembled that foundation as she went to college and scatter the seeds of political activism. During her later years in college, Moody became active in numerous organizations devoted to creating changes to the civil rights of her people. These actions ultimately led to her disillusionment with the success of the movement, despite her constant action. These factors have contributed in shaping her attitude towards race and her skepticism about fundamental change in society.
The Author of this book (On our own terms: race, class, and gender in the lives of African American Women) Leith Mullings seeks to explore the modern and historical lives of African American women on the issues of race, class and gender. Mullings does this in a very analytical way using a collection of essays written and collected over a twenty five year period. The author’s systematic format best explains her point of view. The book explores issues such as family, work and health comparing and contrasting between white and black women as well as between men and women of both races.
The history of racial and class stratification in Los Angeles has created tension amongst and within groups of people. Southland, by Nina Revoyr, reveals how stratification influences a young Asian woman to abandon her past in order to try and fully integrate herself into society. The group divisions are presented as being personal divisions through the portrayal of a generational gap between the protagonist, Jackie, and her grandfather. Jackie speaks of her relationship with Rebecca explaining her reasons why she could never go for her. Jackie claims that “she looked Asian enough to turn Jackie off” (Revoyr, 2003, p. 105). Unlike her grandfather who had a good sense of where he came from and embraced it, Jackie rejected her racial background completely. Jackie has been detached from her past and ethnicity. This is why she could never be with Rebecca, Jackie thought of her as a “mirror she didn’t want to look into”. Rebecca was everything Jackie was tr...
She leaves behind her family in order to pursue what she believes is the greater good. She leaves behind a family of nine, living in extreme poverty, to live with her biological father—who runs out on her at a young age to satisfy his need to feel big and important, simply based on anxieties about the hardships around him. Moody comes from a highly difficult and stressful situation, but she stands as the only hope for her starving family and leaves them behind for a life of scholarship and opportunity. This memoir leaves the reader with a sense of guilt for Moody’s decisions, and one may even argue that these decisions happened in vain, as the movement never made a massive impact on race relations. Unfortunately for Moody, she would continue to witness atrocious hate crimes up until the year of her
Rebecca Walker is a Jewish African American young women, who experience a heart breaking childhood. Growing up she was shuffled from one side of the country to the other, switching form one world to the other. In Rebecca Walker’s famous book, Black, White, and Jewish, she struggled to choice what race she wanted to be acquainted with, struggled to build lasting relationships, and continued to fight for the love and attention she wanted.
Anne Moody had thought about joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but she never did until she found out one of her roommates at Tougaloo college was the secretary. Her roommate asked, “why don’t you become a member” (248), so Anne did. Once she went to a meeting, she became actively involved. She was always participating in various freedom marches, would go out into the community to get black people to register to vote. She always seemed to be working on getting support from the black community, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Son after she joined the NAACP, she met a girl that was the secretary to the ...
The family member I interviewed is my mother, though she herself is not an immigrant, due to the circumstances of her upbringing, I thought she would relate more to Reyna Grande’s story than my father would. My mother has always shared stories of her upbringing with me and my siblings, she would often tell us stories of growing up in Hasidim from the ages of four to fifteen were like and how assimilating back into secular culture was like coming to a new country. Though I have heard the stories before and knew a majority of the answers to my questions I did find out some things I was not aware of. One of the major things I didn’t know before was that my mother had mostly spoken Yiddish in her childhood and coming back to secular culture a major challenge of that was overcoming a limited knowledge of the English language. And although she did come back to secular culture, knowing a fair amount of English due to the extreme censorship in Hasidim there was a large amount of words and concept she had never heard of before things like dinosaurs and science were completely foreign to her. I sat with my mother for well over and hour and we talked about these sort of things. In conclusion I came to terms with my own culture and feelings of disconnect with my Jewish heritage and
Angela Yvonne Davis’ interest in social justice began during her youth when she was exposed firsthand to the hateful and violent consequences of racism. She was born on ...
childhood was filled with thriving community as well as isolation from the hatred and racism that lurked outside of the confines of Eatonville. “[Zora’s] early childhood was so free from discrimination that it took a trip to Jacksonville, with its...
Smith, J, & Phelps, S (1992). Notable Black American Women, (1st Ed). Detroit, MI: Gale
Growing up as the young child of sharecroppers in Mississippi, Essie Mae Moody experienced and observed the social and economic deprivation of Southern Blacks. As a young girl Essie Mae and her family struggled to survive, often by the table scraps of the white families her mother worked for. Knowing little other than the squalor of their living conditions, she realizes this disparity while living in a two-room house off the Johnson’s property, whom her mother worked for, watching the white children play, “Here they were playing in a house that was nicer than any house I could have dreamed of”(p. 33). Additionally, the segregated school she attends was a “one room rotten wood building.” (p. 14), but Essie Mae manages to get straight A’s while caring for her younger sibli...
My interview with Ms. Chung was of moderate duration, lasting for about half an hour. While it occurred over the phone, it felt somewhat personal. Ms. Chung certainly has a knack for connecting with those she engages. Questions largely pertained to her career but some of her life and personal story shined through in her answers. It was a very revealing and thought provoking experience for m...
Adrienne Rich is a southern Jew who grew up during the forties. Rich lived in a gentle neighborhood and was never taught about her Jewish heritage. She eventually had to deal with conflicts between the religious and cultural heritage of her father’s Jewish background and her mother’s southern Protestantism (Pope). Rich’s father didn’t show any signs of ethnicity in any way. He did this to fit into a society that was against Jewish people. In many of her works, Adrienne Rich talks about being oppressed. In her poem, “1948: Jews,” Adrienne Rich refers to her college years. At Radcliffe University, she was to stay away from Jews. No matter how much she wanted, she could not unite with them as a group because socially it was less acceptable. She had to avoid her own ethnicity to survive in the American culture. “A Vision,” is another poem Rich wrote that discusses the issue of...
...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.