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Story behind i know why the caged bird sings
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Black Feminists Debate Whiteness
Stephanie Philipovich & Angela Torchia
Passage #1:
"Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play."(Morris, pg. 7)
Passage #2:
here is teh hous it is green and white it has a red door it is very prety hrere is the family mother father dick andjane live in the green and white hous they's are very happy see jane she gots a red dress she wants too play.
(Both passages based on the passages found in the opening of The Bluest Eye.)
Passage taken from I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
"After we left Mr. Willie Williams' Do Drop Inn, the last stop before whitefolksville, we had to cross the pond and adventure the railroad tracks. We were explorers walking without weapons into man-eating animals' territory.
In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than that they were different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked for the ragged against the well dressed.
I remember never believing that whites were really real… Whitefolks couldn't be people because their feet were too small, their skin too white and see-throughy, and they didn't walk on the balls of their feet the way people did- they walked on their heels like horses.
People were those who lived on my side of town.
Coates wrote a 176 page long letter to his 14 years old son to explain what the African American society were going through at the time being. In the book, Coates used himself as an example to demonstrate the unjust treatment that had been cast upon him and many other African Americans. Readers can sense a feeling of pessimism towards African American’s future throughout the entire book although he did not pointed it out directly.
DuBois. DuBois thought the problem of the 20th century was the color line, put simply, blacks vs. whites. Almost every single vendor that was interviewed in this film was African American. This represents the views by DuBois that blacks were seen as second-class citizens. Also, we learned that some of these vendors were forced into the business due to a criminal record, leading to them being able to get most jobs in society. Even without a criminal record, some African Americans still have a hard time finding jobs in society. In studies of race, Pager proved that African Americans who did not have a criminal record were less likely to get a job than a white person with a criminal record. This further proves DuBois’s point that blacks are seen as lower than whites. These black vendors were treated harshly, like they were beneath the other citizens. But in France, the Christmas tree sellers were white and treated with respect. That is not a coincidence. The white vendors were trusted with the keys to people’s homes. This shows race as a stratification; non-white races were inferior in the past and are in the present as
"The house is 10 feet by 10 feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper. The roof is peaked, the walls are tacked to a wooden frame. The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river...." " ...and the family possesses three old quilts and soggy, lumpy mattress. With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush." (27-28)
Words are commonly used to separate people by the color of their skin, but they can also be used to bring people together, no matter what their skin color was. Using words improperly was a common problem in America when our parents were our age, and even way long before that. People have written countless stories about racism, it’s affect of the world, or it’s effect on the person themselves. One of the more well known poems about racism is “‘Race’ Politics”, by Luis J. Rodriguez. The story the poem is based off of took place sometime in the mid 1960’s, so this gives us an insight of what the world was like back then.
In American history, there are centuries upon centuries of black people being deemed less than or not worthy of. Never in were black people equal, even in the sense of humanity. White people declared black people as three-fifths of a human, so to the “superior race”, because one has darker skin that automatically takes away 40% of their humanity. Now, in white history they repeatedly dominant over other nonwhite groups and especially the women of those groups because they feel anything that isn’t white is inferior.
...ial bland, white, powerless male; nothing is present that distinguishes Mr. Williams from the rest of the seemingly dominant white society. Roman, on the other hand, despite the fact that he lives in poverty, possesses more liveliness and power than Mr. Williams could ever possess. For instance, Roman shows up to take the CAT wearing his “red, yellow, white, and blue grass-dance outfit” because Roman’s grandmother “told [him Mr. William’s] test was culturally biased and that [he] might need a little extra power to do [his] best.” Unlike Mr. Williams, Roman recognizes the power that color possesses, even after death, for Roman vividly remembers “the yellow headlights of the red truck that smashed head-on into his father’s blue Chevy,” his mother’s “red blood coughed into the folds of a white handkerchief,” and the fact that his mother “was buried in a purple dress.”
Blacks were driven out of skilled trades and were excluded from many factories. Racist’s whites used high rents and there was enormous pressure to exclude blacks from areas inhabited by whites.... ... middle of paper ... ...
In the weekly readings for week five we see two readings that talk about the connections between women’s suffrage and black women’s identities. In Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, we see the ways that black women’s identities were marginalized either through their sex or by their race. These identities were oppressed through social groups, laws, and voting rights. Discontented Black Feminists talks about the journey black feminists took to combat the sexism as well as the racism such as forming independent social clubs, sororities, in addition to appealing to the government through courts and petitions. These women formed an independent branch of feminism in which began to prioritize not one identity over another, but to look at each identity as a whole. This paved the way for future feminists to introduce the concept of intersectionality.
The book talks about how there was segregation just about everywhere you looked. In the 1930's the white people had their own restrooms along with their own water fountains and the lacks had their own school and blacks usually did not go to school. They were too busy working on the farm to go to school. The schools only had one room for all of the grades. The children usually walked to school in those days,because they didn't have school buses. They also had to bring their own lunch to school in lunch pails. Today children ride school buses to school. It would kill us if we had to walk to school.We are not use to that much exercise. Also today they serve us lunch in the cafeterias. Although it it is not that good at least they try. They have to work with the limited stuff the school board allows them to buy. Speaking of buses, the blacks would have to sit in the back of the bus and the whites sat in the front. Although,thanks to Rosa Parks, who on day refused to sit in the back of the bus, now blacks can sit wherever they want to sit. Today whites use the same restrooms and water fountains as blacks do. Blacks and whites also attend the same schools. Today schools have different classrooms for every grade.
Segregation is the act of setting someone apart from other people mainly between the different racial groups without there being a good reason. The African American’s had different privileges than the white people had. They had to do many of their daily activities separated from the white people. In A Lesson Before Dying there were many examples of segregation including that the African American’s had a different courthouse, jail, church, movie theater, Catholic and public school, department stores, bank, dentist, and doctor than the white people. The African American’s stayed downtown and the white people remained uptown. The white people also had nicer and newer building and attractions than the African American’s did. They had newer books and learning tools compared to the African American’s that had books that were falling apart and missing pages and limited amount of supplies for their students. The African American’s were treated as if they were lesser than the white people and they had to hold doors and let them go ahead of them to show that they knew that they were not equal to them and did not have the same rights or privileges as they did just because of their race. In A Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass segregation is shown through both slavery and the free African American’s during this time. It showed that the African American’s were separated from the white people and not
I want to make it clear, to those who may question my positionality, that I do not believe that my journey as a white person is somehow special or better than anyone else’s. I do not believe that I hold some sort of special looking glass through which the solution to whiteness can be seen. I am a production of whiteness, and I am also a human being, which means I have many, many, flaws and blind spots that I continue to work on while simultaneously being inhibited by this blindness in my effort to see past it. What I do believe, as Roxanne Gay so beautifully said in Bad Feminist, is that,
In her book Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks describes how she helps her students find their voice within her classroom.She discusses her use of authority to enable her students.For her, teacher authority is a necessary part of helping her students find their voices:
Harriet Jacobs escaped from slavery and at great personal risk wrote of her trials as a house servant in the South and later fugitive in the North. Her slave narrative entitled Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl gave a true account of the evils slavery held for women, a perspective that has been kept relatively secret from the public. In writing her story, Jacobs, though focused on the subjugation due to race, gave voice subtly to a different kind of captivity, that which men impose on women regardless of color in the patriarchal society of the ninetenth century. This form of bondage is not only exacted from women by their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, but also is accepted and perpetuated by women themselves, who forge the cage that holds them captive. Jacobs directed her stirring account of the afflictions a woman is subjected to in the chain of slavery to women of the North to gain sympathy for their sisters that were enslaved in the South. In showing this, Jacobs reveals the danger of such self condemnation women maintain by accepting the idealized role that men have set as a goal for which to strive. Harriet Jacobs' slave epic is a powerful statement unveiling the impossibility and undesirability of achieving the ideal put forth by men and maintained by women. Her narrative is a strong feminist text.
Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism introduces ideas by Becky Thompson that contradict the “traditional” teachings of the Second Wave of feminism. She points out that the version of Second Wave feminism that gets told centers around white, middle class, US based women and the central problem being focused on and rallied against is sexism. This history of the Second Wave does not take into consideration feminist movements happening in other countries. Nor does it take into consideration the feminist activism that women of color were behind, that centered not only on sexism, but also racism, and classism as central problems as well. This is where the rise of multiracial feminism is put to the foreground and
“Everyone is kneaded out of the same dough but not baked in the same oven”(Yiddish Proverb). These words apply to Katherine Mansfield’s short story, “Garden Party” as she touches on some very controversial points about the social inequality of the Sheridan family with its surrounding neighbors. A great internal and external quarrel over social class rises in the Sheridan family as Laura Sheridan, the daughter, sympathises with the less-fortunate neighbors while her mother, Mrs. Sheridan is the opposite. Mansfield illustrates to her readers the conflict within Laura in various ways, namely, using foil characters between Mrs. Sheridan and Laura, using multiple symbols and appealing to emotion to emphasize her main message of social equality.