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Social class and society
Brief history of racism
Brief history of racism
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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 …show more content…
By writing long lines then opposing them with short phrases, the writing is able to convey an adverse view, which is generally applied to black culture, onto the local more privileged community. She again employs plural point of view to demonstrate how, as a collective minority, “we often think of uptown”(5), referring to white society. The silent nights then described in line six refer to the apparent blandness of white culture when compared to the lively nature of the inner city. The long lines of 6 and 7 are then disrupted by line 8 in a very abrupt and jarring manner: “and the houses straight as” (7) “dead men” (8). This wording not only plays on the uniformity of White Culture, but addresses social divisions both past and present. The comparison of the white houses to dead men is a comparison of the insipid area that is uptown to the lively nature of the inner city and black life. A passed and darker meaning also rests on the shoulders of these dead men, as the houses that these wealthy whites inhabit have been built on the backs of African American’s since the countries origins. By applying these new and controversial images to both cultures, Clifton challenges societal conventions among both races in attempt to shift views concerning how black life is portrayed versus its
The author illustrates the “dim, rundown apartment complex,” she walks in, hand and hand with her girlfriend. Using the terms “dim,” and “rundown” portrays the apartment complex as an unsafe, unclean environment; such an environment augments the violence the author anticipates. Continuing to develop a perilous backdrop for the narrative, the author describes the night sky “as the perfect glow that surrounded [them] moments before faded into dark blues and blacks, silently watching.” Descriptions of the dark, watching sky expand upon the eerie setting of the apartment complex by using personification to give the sky a looming, ominous quality. Such a foreboding sky, as well as the dingy apartment complex portrayed by the author, amplify the narrator’s fear of violence due to her sexuality and drive her terror throughout the climax of the
In “Queens, 1963”, the speaker narrates to her audience her observations that she has collected from living in her neighborhood located in Queens, New York in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. The narrator is a thirteen-year-old female immigrant who moved from the Dominican Republic to America with her family. As she reflects on her past year of living in America, she reveals a superb understanding of the reasons why the people in her neighborhood act the way they do towards other neighbors. In “Queens, 1963” by Julia Alvarez, the poet utilizes diction, figurative language, and irony to effectively display to the readers that segregation is a strong part of the American melting pot.
The "New Negro," the Black writers in 1920/30, tried to get out of the dominant white assimilation and practice their own tradition and identity in autonomous and active attitude. In virtue of their activities, the Harlem Renaissance became the time of sprouting the blackness. It offered the life of the black as the criterion to judge how well the democracy practices in America and to weigh the measure of the dream of America. Their vitality and artistic spirit, and dreams were so impressive that the Harlem of the 1920s has never been eluded out from the memory of American (Helbling 2).
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement during the 1920s and 1930s, in which African-American art, music and literature flourished. It was significant in many ways, one, because of its success in destroying racist stereotypes and two, to help African-Americans convey their hard lives and the prejudice they experienced. In this era, two distinguished poets are Langston Hughes, who wrote the poem “A Dream Deferred” and Georgia Douglas Johnson who wrote “My Little Dreams”. These two poems address the delayment of justice, but explore it differently, through their dissimilar uses of imagery, tone and diction.
An adequate, detailed description of the setting in ay novel is essential to the reader’s experience. The reader is not provided with any visual cues (unless it is a rare case and the book is illustrated) and must rely solely on the author’s writing ability to achieve a sense of full emersion into the storyline. When the reader is provided with vague detail it is easy for the individual to become frustrated and quickly lose interest. In Chester Himes novel “A Rage in Harlem”, Himes does an excellent job of putting the reader directly in the center of twentieth century Harlem. At times his descriptive writing style border on the extreme, perhaps even making the reader in an emotionally uncomfortable situation. However, with his unique writing style was able to bring the city of Harlem to life for many individuals, who if not to Himes, would have never been exposed to the reality of Harlem and individuals who “lived” Harlem every single day of their lives.
Baldwin gives a vivid sketch of the depressing conditions he grew up on in Fifth Avenue, Uptown by using strong descriptive words. He makes use of such word choices in his beginning sentences when he reflects back to his house which is now replaced by housing projects and “one of those stunted city trees is snarling where our [his] doorway used to be” (Baldwin...
The civil rights movement may have technically ended in the nineteen sixties, but America is still feeling the adverse effects of this dark time in history today. African Americans were the group of people most affected by the Civil Rights Act and continue to be today. Great pain and suffering, though, usually amounts to great literature. This period in American history was no exception. Langston Hughes was a prolific writer before, during, and after the Civil Rights Act and produced many classic poems for African American literature. Hughes uses theme, point of view, and historical context in his poems “I, Too” and “Theme for English B” to expand the views on African American culture to his audience members.
The setting of the story is Chicago’s South Side. This area of Chicago was known as the “capital of black America” (Manning), and according to Andrew Wiese, Chicago used to be known as “the most segregated city in America” (118). These seriously contradictory statements are true. Chicago’s South Side was home to William L. Dawson, who was the most powerful black politician at the time, and Joe Luis, who was a boxing champion and was known as the most popular black man in America (Manning). It was the most popular place for blacks to migrate to during the Great Migration, and the population grew from 278,000 blacks to 813,000 blacks. Most of the neighborhoods located in the South Side were poor and highly segregated from the rich white neighborhoods located just outside the South Side (Pacyga). The housing in these areas was very poor as well. Most of the African Americans at the time lived in a small apartment called a kitchenette. These were cramped with a small kitchen and small rooms (Plotkin). Lorraine Hansberry describes the Youngers house as a worn out, cramped, and very small apartment (23). She also talks about the small kitchen, living room, and bedrooms (24). These apartments were not ideal, but it was all that many African Americans could afford. If African Americans tried to move nicer neighborhoods, whites would perform violent acts on them (Choldin). This violence was recorded in a African American newspaper, known the Chicago Defender (Best).
Namely, he gets his message across to his audience with the use of imagery. Even so, he says that when he’s out walking the streets of Brooklyn at night, he finds that women “set their faces on neutral”, place their purses “across their chest bandolier style”, and “forge ahead as though bracing themselves from being talked” (Staples 543). With this use of imagery, Staples is able to place an image in the reader’s head of a young women walking the streets- alone, tense, and skittish- all because of man who, unbeknownst, means no harm to her. This denotes the theme of racial profiling in society because it shows the woman’s fear of an African American walking the streets, whom of which has not made one advance or threatening move towards the woman. The woman’s ability to assume the worst in the blink of an eye shows how society has been drilled with the influence of stereotypes and racial profiling. This leads to the fact that an innocent man is being ridiculed for the color of his skin while he had done nothing to cause such actions. Moreover, the description of the woman’s reaction to Staples makes the audience pity him because of his innocence in the cruel and unfair situation and unwillingness to be anybody other than an innocent bystander. Additionally, Staples’ use
...ites a short 33-line poem that simply shows the barriers between races in the time period when racism was still openly practiced through segregation and discrimination. The poem captures the African American tenant’s frustrations towards the landlord as well as the racism shown by the landlord. The poem is a great illustration of the time period, and it shows how relevant discrimination was in everyday life in the nineteen-forties. It is important for the author to use the selected literary devices to help better illustrate his point. Each literary device in the poem helps exemplify the author’s intent: to increase awareness of the racism in the society in the time period.
During the early to mid-twentieth century Langston Hughes contributed vastly to a very significant cultural movement later to be named the “Harlem Renaissance.” At the time it was named the “New Negro Movement,” which involved African Americans in creating and expressing their words through literature and art. Hughes contributed in a variety of different aspects including plays, poems, short stories, novels and even jazz. He was even different from other notable black poets at the time in the way that he shared personal experiences rather than the ordinary everyday experiences of black America. His racial pride helped mold American politics and literature into what it is today.
In 1942, Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her poem For My People. This accomplishment heralded the beginning of Margaret Walker’s literary career which spanned from the brink of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s to the cusp of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (Gates and McKay 1619). Through her fiction and poetry, Walker became a prominent voice in the African-American community. Her writing, especially her signature novel, Jubilee, exposes her readers to the plight of her race by accounting the struggles of African Americans from the pre-Civil War period to the present and ultimately keeps this awareness relevant to contemporary American society.
Many assume that Blues and Jazz were the only musical influences that impacted the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, with the pursuit for heritage and identity, many aspects of African culture influenced Renaissance poetry musically. However, focus also needs to be placed on more controversial topics, such as religion and gender, as poets challenged oppression.
The image of African-American’s changed from rural, uneducated “peasants” to urban, sophisticated, cosmopolites. Literature and poetry are abounded. Jazz music and the clubs where it was performed at became social “hotspots”. Harlem is the epitome of the “New Negro”. However, things weren’t as sunny as they appeared.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.