The readings were insightful and had interesting approaches to Negro mood. They had many emotional elements that were for the readers understanding of the different situations Negroes faced. When looking at the writings collectively they create a timeline. The timeline shows the various changes the Negroes mindset has gone through. The reader is exposed to three types of Negroes; one, the compliant Negro who knows his place, two, the Negro with will take his revenge and three, Negro who is conflicted between his desires and his responsibilities to his people. The poem, "We Wear the Mask”, by Paul Laurence Dunbar is about separating Blacks people from the masks they wear. When Blacks wear their masks they are not simply hiding from their oppressor they are also hiding from themselves. This type of deceit cannot be repaid with material things. This debt can only be repaid through repentance and self-realization. The second stanza of “We Wear the Mask” tells Blacks whites should not know about their troubles. It would only give them leverage over Blacks. Black peoples’ pain and insecurities ought to be kept amongst themselves. There is no need for anyone outside the black race to know what lies beneath their masks. The third stanza turns to a divine being. Blacks look to god because he made them and is the only one that can understand them. They must wear their mask proudly. The world should stay in the dark about who they are. This poem is about Blacks knowing their place and staying in it. This is the only way they could be safe. The poem “If We Must Die”, by Claude McKay, very different from Durbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask”. The voice in this poem has strong and demanding tone. This poem was written for a black movement. ... ... middle of paper ... ... Negro mood, individual needs versus the race needs, right versus wrong and civilized verses primal instincts. In the end the Colonel was right. Negroes were born to serve and submit but not to an oppressor. Their serve and submit to their race and family needs. The two poems are two extreme sides of the Negro mentality. They do not leave opportunity for other Blacks to move. They are both required complete conformity. The short story was about Blacks weighting their options. It shows that Blacks can think logically about their action. In conclusion, I think these three writings gave a clear picture of Negro situation when they were written. As a collective the show the changes Blacks have gone through due to their experiences. Each one was well written and has literary worth. They forced me to think about their deeper meanings and the challenged how I saw Blacks.
In his poems, Langston Hughes treats racism not just a historical fact but a “fact” that is both personal and real. Hughes often wrote poems that reflect the aspirations of black poets, their desire to free themselves from the shackles of street life, poverty, and hopelessness. He also deliberately pushes for artistic independence and race pride that embody the values and aspirations of the common man. Racism is real, and the fact that many African-Americans are suffering from a feeling of extreme rejection and loneliness demonstrate this claim. The tone is optimistic but irritated. The same case can be said about Wright’s short stories. Wright’s tone is overtly irritated and miserable. But this is on the literary level. In his short stories, he portrays the African-American as a suffering individual, devoid of hope and optimism. He equates racism to oppression, arguing that the African-American experience was and is characterized by oppression, prejudice, and injustice. To a certain degree, both authors are keen to presenting the African-American experience as a painful and excruciating experience – an experience that is historically, culturally, and politically rooted. The desire to be free again, the call for redemption, and the path toward true racial justice are some of the themes in their
When it all comes down to it, one of the greatest intellectual battles U.S. history was the legendary disagreement between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. This intellectual debate sparked the interest of the Northerners as well as the racist whites that occupied the south. This debate was simply about how the blacks, who just gained freedom from slavery, should exist in America with the white majority. Even though Washington and DuBois stood on opposite sides of the fence they both agreed on one thing, that it was a time for a change in the treatment of African Americans. I chose his topic to write about because I strongly agree with both of the men’s ideas but there is some things about their views that I don’t agree with. Their ideas and views are the things that will be addressed in this essay.
... collective consciousness of the Black community in the nineteen hundreds were seen throughout the veil a physical and psychological and division of race. The veil is not seen as a simple cloth to Du Bois but instead a prison which prevents the blacks from improving, or gain equality or education and makes them see themselves as the negative biases through the eyes of the whites which helps us see the sacred as evil. The veil is also seen as a blindfold and a trap on the many thousands which live with the veil hiding their true identity, segregated from the whites and confused themselves in biases of themselves. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folks had helped to life off the veil and show the true paid and sorry which the people of the South had witnessed. Du Bois inclines the people not to live behind the veil but to live above it to better themselves as well as others.
The theme throughout the two poems "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" and "From the Dark Tower" is the idea that African American live in an unjust
In more modern times Negroes seemed to have morally surrendered on trying to belong. In the past Negroes wanted to be a part of society and America. They wanted to belong. During the years that the book was written blacks no longer care to belong. In the past a Negro wrote, “I am a man and deemed nothing that relates to man a matter of indifference to me.” In more modern times a Negro would say, “Now, I am a colored man, and you white folks must settle that matter among yourselves.” This was found in the pages of The Mis-Education of the Negro in chapter 10. You’d think that this meant they gained some pride in their race, but what I got from the chapter was that they accepted that they were inferior and has also accepted their fate that whites have made for them. They no longer resist and fight. The people in more modern times stopped standing up for themselves and even highly educated Negroes began to support things such as
The white negro attempts to escape the conformity of the time through not a pursuit of instant gratification can lead to the ultimate clash with society—violence.
In the poem “Strange Fruit” the author uses many deadly situations to explain the severe pain these human beings were experiencing. “Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck” (Allan 9) is a symbol of even after death African-Americans were still experiencing pain. After one passes away they usually go to peace and God, but these people were left there on the trees lynched for animals like crows to eat them away because no one cared about them. Crows are a symbol of death because they eat rotten, dead, and leftover animals and flesh. Crows can also be symbolic to the Jim Crow Laws that were racial segregation laws targeting a particular race and culture of people. Another symbolic example is “Then the sudden smell of burning flesh” (Allan 8). This quote is so graphic and distasteful to hear people were on purposely being burned to death in gas chambers and in fires. This symbolizes so many different aspects like inhumanity, pain, violence, torment, and misery. Everyone has the right to live and they were killed with no real cause. Similarly, in “We Wear the Mask” the phrase “We wear the mask the grins and lies” (Dunbar 1) embodies the tragic and excruciating truth being covered up with a fake lie. In the mid 1960’s particular people were not allowed to voice or show their emotions, feelings, or ideas because they would be murdered. The mask was used to cover up the painful truth with a happy, positive
His rhetorical strategies are effective in providing logical, credible, and impotence reason as to why someone cannot be born with prejudice. Whether we all agree or not prejudice is alive and strong in today’s society and Douglass and other Civil Rights activist who has fought against would turn in their graves to know that America’s society has regressed instead of progress on moving forward on the issue of prejudice. However, Douglass compelling arguments stand to prove that prejudice in society should not exist because it can be overcome and I support his
W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk first advises the reader in “The Forethought” to take in the novel as an attempt to understand the world of African Americans and life before full emancipation. The novel is addressed to the people of the early twentieth century and consists of various collections of autobiographical and historical essays. Throughout the novel, Du Bois stresses the conflict of the “color-line” that has profoundly existed between blacks and whites; and, he sets these themes and theories about this conflict as a detailed blueprint for the full emancipation of the African Americans. Du Bois illustrates the duality or “double-consciousness” that centralizes around his main novel as well as the “Veil” that many of the African Americans experienced during that time. He interprets many of his own experiences and creates a narrative of the story of the souls of all black people. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois straddles the two colored worlds and portrays, in an effective way, the meaning of African Americans’ involvement in the twentieth century.
This poem is written from the perspective of an African-American from a foreign country, who has come to America for the promise of equality, only to find out that at this time equality for blacks does not exist. It is written for fellow black men, in an effort to make them understand that the American dream is not something to abandon hope in, but something to fight for. The struggle of putting up with the racist mistreatment is evident even in the first four lines:
Du Bois's book provides an insight into how African- Americans felt, and handled things during this controversial time. The main topics of The Souls of Black Folk include African- American worldviews, the policies of Booker T Washington, the impact of segregation and discrimination upon black folk, stereotypes, African- American history and spirituality, and generl feelings possesed by African- Americans of this time. Du Bois makes some very stron point and includes his own perspective in his writing. Du Bois even created his own ideals of how black folks could achieve complete freedom. In his opinion, the most important aspects of life that African-Americans should be granted with are, the right to an education, the right to vote, and the right to be treated justly and as an equal. This is an apperant opinion of his throughout the entir...
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” is a lyric poem in which the point of attraction, the mask, represents the oppression and sadness held by African Americans in the late 19th century, around the time of slavery. As the poem progresses, Dunbar reveals the façade of the mask, portrayed in the third stanza where the speaker states, “But let the dream be otherwise” (13). The unreal character of the mask has played a significant role in the lives of African Americans, who pretend to put on a smile when they feel sad internally. This occasion, according to Dunbar, is the “debt we pay to human guile," meaning that their sadness is related to them deceiving others. Unlike his other poems, with its prevalent use of black dialect, Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” acts as “an apologia (or justification) for the minstrel quality of some of his dialect poems” (Desmet, Hart, and Miller 466).
It shows the resilience and determination that enslaved African had to retain a vital piece of their identity, and not forcedly assimilate into the culture they were thrown into. This demonstrates their battle against “fixed-identity”, in that, they did not conform to the beliefs of their enslavers. Their ancestors exemplify the quest for complex subjectivity as well, in that they did not conform or accept the black religions that were made in response to slavery. They kept the religion that their ancestors started out with hundreds of years prior, when others left it and adopted their
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.
Paul Laurence Dunbar uses a lot of symbolism in his poems. In “We Wear the Mask” (1897), Dunbar is referring to the hard exterior the African Americans had to portray in order to make it through the tough times. When Dunbar writes, “Why should the world be overwise, In counting all our tears and sighs” (Dunbar, 1897, p. 1808). What Dunbar is saying is why give the people anything else to us against them. There has been enough suffering, there is no need to add fuel to the fire so to speak. They will remember and honor their families, but they will never let anyone see the pain they struggle with every day (Dunbar, 1897). In the poem “Sympathy” (1899) Dunbar writes about a caged bird (Dunbar, 1897). The caged bird represents how his people are