Racism In Sonny's Blues

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Assignment 3 – Sonny’s Blues The Civil Rights period marked the beginning of fundamental change for African Americans. African Americans were determined more than ever to take action/a stand to stop the injustice and inequalities that had been directed to them for over 300 years. As a result, black authors during that time used more radical techniques of writing in order to truly educate about the injustice concerning their community, and how the failure of government to secure the rights of black people was in great cause. In James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, Baldwin’s use of protest fiction in order to denounce and expose the poor living conditions African Americans in Harlem greatly reflected the literary movement of his time. In this following …show more content…

However, we must take into account the fact that poverty is, if not entirely, the major cause of this issue. At the time this story was written, in the 1950s, unemployment within the black community was dangerously high, mainly because of the racial discrimination during the hiring process. Moreover, during the New Negro Renaissance, the belief spread that black people were intellectually inferior and therefore couldn’t handle the responsibility of higher paying jobs. To all those causes I believe the government could’ve take a stand in order for that not to happen. Many solutions could’ve been taken into action by the government in order to decrease the unemployment rate such as campaigns abolishing false and horrible rumors regarding black people, encouraging employers in employing black people (by even giving out subventions or other forms of reward), …show more content…

Indeed, the narrator and Sonny’s dad had seen his beloved brother get killed by a group of drunk white boys: “They was having fun, they just wanted to scare him the way they do sometimes, you know”. In this previous passage, by saying “the way they do sometimes’ we see that white people terrorizing black people was of commonplace. Now, the white men that crashed into the father’s brother may not have had the intention of killing him, but they sure found entertaining the fact of scarring him two black man as they knew the “inferiority” they had on them at that

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