“… in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century” (587). On June 20th, 1943 fights between black and white teenagers broke out at Belle Isle Park, an integrated amusement park on an island in the Detroit River. The conflict quickly spread off the island with the help of rumors and began to plague the rest of the city. After two days of violence, 6,000 federal troops were sent into Detroit to deescalate the situation.…
In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, she portrays the prejudice and racism against minorities, especially black, that we face and hear about in our everyday lives. Moreover, she ambiguously leaves the reader to visualize whatever we want by flashing incomplete stories that are without cause and effect. By giving us different instances of prejudice and racism that happen in her life and other black people’s lives, she urges us to take a closer look at our everyday lives to understand racism by having us to fill in cause or effect by our own using personal experience or past/current issues. Many of prejudgment and racism happen without even giving second thoughts or happen in places where prejudgment and racism shouldn’t have happened.…
In “The Case for Reparations”, Ta-Nehisi Coates sets forth a powerful argument that the United States must find a way to atone for past injustices against black Americans. Rather than asking for money or anything of the sort, Coates basically argues that it’s the idea of reparations that counts. He believes that such is necessary for Americans to come to terms with the injustices that occurred, partially due to the belief in white supremacy, and to go through a spiritual renewal of some sort. Through various techniques, Coates supports the claim that paying reparations is both paying a moral debt and acknowledging past injustices.…
The United States of America was a nation built upon the notion of freedom and equal opportunity- in which all peoples have impartial opportunities and rights. However, these principles did not always have their right of way. From the first ship of enslaved African Americans to arrive in the early seventeenth century to modern times, discrimination and racial segregation has always been an issue. In both “Sympathy”-- a poem about a caged bird’s fight for freedom after being liberated from slavery-- by Paul Laurence Dunbar and A Voice That Challenged a Nation --a biography which spoke about Marian’s struggle for equal rights after she had experienced the harshness of the South --by Russell Freedman, the two parties faced the challenges of…
Analysis Essay Can you imagine living in a time when you were judged and treated differently due to your skin color? In If Beale Street Could Talk,the author, James Baldwin, addresses this issue. The book is a mixture of a love story and the issue of racism , injustice, and prejudices. The book takes place in New York, from the viewpoint of a young black women, Tish, who is deeply in love with a young artists, Fonny, who has been arrested for a crime he has not committed. When it is discovered that Tish is pregnant, the families are supportive of the couple along with the drive to get Fonny out of jail.…
The author does this well by understanding that a reader is more than likely aware of what racial discrimination is, what it looks like, and are able to associate it as atrocious. He encourages this feeling of sympathy by making the reader face the negative act head on through the main…
Claude McKay is a brilliant poet, whose words illustrate the struggles of black communities in America. Some of his most popular poems are about a black man living in America. In fact, “America” is arguably one of his most influential poems, speaking about the duality of the United States through the eyes of a black man. Claude McKay was a skilled poet who used many literary techniques to convey his deep-rooted messages in his poems. He uses specific techniques such as a sonnet structure in “America.”…
Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, authors during the Harlem Renaissance, used their poetry and short stories to challenge ideas about race and the division it caused in America. The narrators in Hughes’ “Theme for English B” and Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” are both in the process of exploring their racial identities, yet while the narrator in Hurston’s story embraces her differences, the speaker in Hughes’ poem is more focused on questioning the aspects that cause him and his white classmates to differ. Nonetheless, Hughes and Hurston both use a common theme of racial identity as well as symbolism and the use of metaphor, to explain the struggle of being African-American in the 20th century. In Hughes’ poem “Theme for…
Analysis of a Poem: “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes “Theme for English B,” by Langston Hughes, is a short poem that is centered on a young colored student whose instructor has asked him to write an essay about himself with the demand that it must be “true.” The speaker’s tone of voice throughout the poem shows the reader the struggle that a colored person has with identifying themselves on where they stand in a class room with a white instructor. With the author’s specific use of imagery and tone, Hughes builds up theme that two people may be seen as equal no matter what their ethnicity is.…
Rankine employs the Serena Williams narrative as a prime example of how this discriminatory viewpoint held by the ‘sharp white background’ of society led to her unfair portrayal and treatment. Specifically, Williams’ audience would rather picture her “working the land” than excelling in a world reserved for white people (Rankine 26). This reference evokes vivid images of black, slave laborers toiling on the fields of plantations. Consequently, Rankine suggests that the ‘sharp white background’ would prefer black citizens to maintain their historically low positions in the social hierarchy. Rankine implies that, because of this unspoken discrimination, people of color are put under a microscope in society’s ‘sharp white background,’ where they are the subject of condemnation and controversy in situations where a white person would not be.…
If you are looking to get personal, honest, and relevant insight on racism in America, Citizen: An American Lyric is the perfect book to read. Citizen: An American Lyric was published in 2014 by poet Claudia Rankine. This book is a compilation of poems, essays, and visual art to give the reader a closer look of what it is like being black in America. The book is written in seven sections which are all similar in style and content. With each section giving different stories, microaggressions, and short essays relevant to racism.…
AVID Mission Statement My childhood was spent with four women. They constructed a space for me that was void of the manacles of racial standards, an expanse free for me to roam and wallow freely in its immaculate glory. As i endeavored to America, this space shrunk further and further until it had transformed into a cramped chamber. For the first time, I had to grapple with what it meant to be black, to have your skin’s…
“If we desire a society without discrimination, then we must not discriminate against anyone in the process of building this society” (Bayard Rustin). In the 1940s, discrimination was a problem for America and today there is still much to be done. During the 1940s, Audre Lorde was a black child who lived a sheltered life from the problem of discrimination until her trip to Washington D.C. for the Fourth of July. On their trip, Audre learned many things about the reality of life for the colored compared to the whites. In the narrative essay, Fourth of July, Audre Lorde encounters the obstacle of race showing how even in the nation’s capital, freedom was guaranteed only for whites, which proves how in society inequality contributed to a lack of opportunity.…
Ruth Fordman and I were the only people of color in the room. “Oh lord, here we go” I thought to myself. I could feel the heavy weight of my heart beating faster against my chest as I was filled with the memories of my ancestors. Relax I whispered inside as if the mere volume of my voice might disturb the room making my deep seated anguish and hatred known. “Today, we are going to be writing two types of poetry, a haiku and free verse” Mrs. Fordman announced.…
Additionally, Jerzy Kamionowski’s journal entitled, “Make It News”: Racist (Micro)Aggressions, the Lyrical You, and Increased Legibility in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric alludes that Rankine’s book, “... compared to the many other works they studied together as part of the course, gave the reader an “unmediated access to a recognizable truth.” (Kamionowski, 367). The implication being that Rankine’s work is working to shed light on the issue of microaggression in a way that many other writers are not able to…