Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Racism in children's literature
Cultural factors on children
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Racism in children's literature
During the interview with Sherman Alexie, he states, “I had no idea that my small life could appeal to anybody.. And it was because of all the Native writers that came before me that made me realize that my story might be important”. As you can see, the Native American life can seem so insignificant and make so many feels as if they have no impact on the world. Born into an undersized Indian Reservation, Sherman Alexie felt as if he couldn't go after his dream of becoming a pediatrician, as he states in the KCTS9 interview. He knew that he had to leave the reservation and go to the white school so that he could go after his desires in life. Alexie was going to be making a big choice and understood he would be “playing against his own siblings
Stephen Boos has worked in the food service industry for over 30 years. He started as a bus person and subsequently trained as a chef’s apprentice. Steve’s mother believed that a college education was something that everyone should receive. She felt that a college degree was a good investment in Steve’s future. In 1976 at his mother’s insistence, Boos moved to Northeastern Ohio to attend Kent State University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration. After graduation, Steve began working for East Park Restaurant as a line cook. Using his education as a foundation, Steve made a point to learn everything he could about running a restaurant, from cutting meat to the bi-weekly food and beverage orders. His versatility, keen business sense, and ability to control costs resulted in Steve’s promotion to General Manager, as role he has held since 1995.
Sam R. Watkins was a Confederate soldier from Columbia, Tennessee. At age twenty-one, Watkins joined the First Tennessee Regiment along with one hundred and nineteen other young men and boys. He was one of only seven men to survive every one of its battles. He writes a memoir twenty years after being in the war about his experience as a private. Watkins juxtaposes stories of horror and gruesome death with humorous memories throughout his four years in the war.
Alexander Hill, Just Business Christian Ethics for the Marketplace. Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 2008. Paperback. $14.95Jessica Burt
Sherman Alexie was a man who is telling us about his life. As an author he uses a lot of repetition, understatement, analogy, and antithesis. Alexie was a man of greater words and was a little Indian boy at the beginning of the story and later became a role model for other boys like him who were shy and alone. Alexie was someone who used his writing to inspire others such as other Indian kids like himself to keep learning and become the best that they can be.
Sherman Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington as a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member (Sherman Alexie). He began his personal battle with substance abuse in 1985 during his freshman year at Jesuit Gonzaga University. The success of his first published work in 1990 incentivized Alexie to overcome his alcohol abuse. “In his short-story and poetry collections, Alexie illuminates the despair, poverty, and alcoholism that often shape the lives of Native Americans living on reservations” (Sherman Alexie). When developing his characters, Alexie often gives them characteristics of substance abuse, poverty and criminal behaviors in an effort to evoke sadness with his readers. Alexie utilizes other art forms, such as film, music, cartoons, and the print media, to bombard mainstream distortion of Indian culture and to redefine Indianness. “Both the term Indian and the stereotypical image are created through histories of misrepresentation—one is a simulated word without a tribal real and the other an i...
Alexie Sherman, a boy under an Indian Reservation that suffers from bullying since the 1st grade, who would have a hard time being around white people and even Indian boys. US Government provided him glasses, accommodation, and alimentation. Alexie chose to use the title "Indian Education" in an effort to express his internalized feelings towards the Native American education system and the way he grew up. He uses short stories separated by the different grades from first grade to twelfth grade to give an idea of what his life was like. He seemed to have grown up in a world surrounded by racism, discrimination, and bullying. This leads on to why he chose not to use the term Native American. He used the term "Indian" to generate negative connotations
Thom Jones writes of war, boxing, sickness and sorrow with a blunt air of familiarity and a cyclone of words. His characters -- much like the author himself, who suffers from epilepsy and diabetes -- have been pummeled by the world, but they refuse to be knocked out. His three short story collection -- The Pugilist at Rest, a National Book Awards finalist; Cold Snap and now SONNY LISTON WAS A FRIEND OF MINE (Little, Brown, $23) -- showcases a supreme writer in the throes of a thinking man's agony.
Overall, Alexie clearly faced much difficulty adjusting to the white culture as a Native American growing up, and expresses this through Victor in his essay, “Indian Education.” He goes through all of the stages of his childhood in comparison with his white counterparts. Racism and bullying are both evident throughout the whole essay. The frustration Alexie got from this is clear through the negativity and humor presented in the experiences he had to face, both on and off of the American Indian reservation. It is evident that Alexie faces discrimination from white people, who he portrays as evil in every way, to show that his childhood was filled with anger, fear, and sorrow.
In conclusion, Sherman Alexie created a story to demonstrate the stereotypes people have created for Native Americans. The author is able to do this by creating characters that present both the negative and positive stereotypes that have been given to Native Americans. Alexie has a Native American background. By writing a short story that depicts the life of an Indian, the reader also gets a glimpse of the stereotypes encountered by Alexie. From this short story readers are able to learn the importance of having an identity while also seeing how stereotypes are used by many people. In the end of the story, both Victor and Thomas are able to have an understanding of each other as the can finally relate with each other through Victor's father.
Alexie shows a strong difference between the treatment of Indian people versus the treatment of white people, and of Indian behavior in the non-Indian world versus in their own. A white kid reading classic English literature at the age of five was undeniably a "prodigy," whereas a change in skin tone would instead make that same kid an "oddity." Non-white excellence was taught to be viewed as volatile, as something incorrect. The use of this juxtaposition exemplifies and reveals the bias and racism faced by Alexie and Indian people everywhere by creating a stark and cruel contrast between perceptions of race. Indian kids were expected to stick to the background and only speak when spoken to. Those with some of the brightest, most curious minds answered in a single word at school but multiple paragraphs behind the comfort of closed doors, trained to save their energy and ideas for the privacy of home. The feistiest of the lot saw their sparks dulled when faced with a white adversary and those with the greatest potential were told that they had none. Their potential was confined to that six letter word, "Indian." This word had somehow become synonymous with failure, something which they had been taught was the only form of achievement they could ever reach. Acceptable and pitiable rejection from the
Native Americans in the media beforehand were interpreted by people who weren’t Indians and were often including Indian stereotypes. That was until Sherman Alexie written The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and the realistic lives of Indian is told, which incorporates all of the Indian’s struggle to achieve their dream with no hope to have, except for 1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a book based on the author’s life and set in the point of view of one Indian whose name is Junior. He lives on a reservation called the Spokane Indian Reservation and would stay there to do everything there, including school. That is until he makes the choice to transfer to a white people’s school called Reardan and that’s when
Alexie portrays his people on the reservation on drunks, suicidal, and very violent people that couldn’t fend for themselves without the help from others. The community also thrives on education as well, and they state of the education system on the reservation was atrocious to even say the least. There text books were out of date and were almost 60 years old. The only way they could receive a decent education system was to leave the reservation. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian” allows us to see how sometimes life can throw you to the curb, but through it all you still have to make the best of what you have in order to continue and succeed in
In Alexie's case, he was constantly judged in school by his peers for attempting to do well. Alexie describes the low expectations of Indian children in his community, that most decided to believe and lived up to. Alexie states, "We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most lived up to those expectations inside the classroom,
That is, many of the actions that take place in the story are real-life accounts from Sherman Alexie himself. However, this is not to say that there is not any level of poetic liberty taken. Dr. Adrienne Kertzer, professor, graduate of Harvard, and author of several works, including the published article Not Exactly: Intertextual Identities and Risky Laughter in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, states; “Among the many benefits of shifting from memoir to novel is an enlargement of the narrative’s focus; the autobiographical story of one individual expands to become potentially the story of many.” (Kertzer 59) She explains that this story, while it is a retelling by Sherman Alexie, finds itself made available and relatable to a much wider base of individuals. This means that in a certain context, the novel’s plot is highly representative of many Native American’s
Lord Lionel Robbins was born in 1898, and was one of the many great economists of our time. Robbins was known for his contributions to economic policy, methodology, and the history of ideas, but made his name as a theorist. Robbins was made famous for his definition of economics, "Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." (The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics 2007) Robbins was able to change the Anglo-Saxon thought economics off its Marshallian process and onto the Continental train of thought.