Physical violence is the most harmful manifestation of racism, but the subtler incidents like this one, in which therapist who specializes in trauma counseling exposes the narrator to the trauma of prejudice, are just as dangerous. When physical violence occurs, it carries legal consequences because the act is not condoned by the law or the people. The more passive verbally racism is usually not punished, which can give the perpetrator a sense that what he or she has done or said was not wrong. Indeed, the perpetrators of this kind of racism are often taken by surprise as the attitudes they hold but refuse to acknowledge suddenly become public, and they are left facing a situation that is, at the very least, awkward, but more likely deeply
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Ginsberg shows that these roles can backfire and achieve the opposite of their intended effect, recalling his mother “dressing in a cotton robe...as you vainly made your lips more real with lipstick, looking in the mirror to see if the Insanity was Me or a earful of police” (Ginsberg 27-28). The use of the word “vainly” here carries a double meaning: her vanity prompts her to try to make herself beautiful, but her efforts to embody womanhood by making herself beautiful are in vain, that is, futile. She is a “blessed daughter come to America,” and a “Communist beauty,” not an American beauty, and any efforts to make herself something she is not, even in the name of American citizenship, will inevitably fail (Ginsberg 29). When citizenship imposes itself on people who do not desire it, the results will be ugly. However, when these racial and gender roles are rejected, consciously or unconsciously, the results can be an increased sense of citizenship. The narrator of “Song of Myself,” whose sense of citizenship is the most positive and universal of the three texts, interprets his citizenship as a mandate to think and act freely, functioning as a virtual representative of citizenship in order to uphold its integrity. When a runaway slave seeks refuge at the narrator’s home, the narrator is presented with a choice between actual representation (following the letter of the law) or virtual representation (exercising his right as a citizen to freely follow his own conscience), and chooses the
Ginsberg shows that these roles can backfire and achieve the opposite of their intended effect, recalling his mother “dressing in a cotton robe...as you vainly made your lips more real with lipstick, looking in the mirror to see if the Insanity was Me or a earful of police” (Ginsberg 27-28). The use of the word “vainly” here carries a double meaning: her vanity prompts her to try to make herself beautiful, but her efforts to embody womanhood by making herself beautiful are in vain, that is, futile. She is a “blessed daughter come to America,” and a “Communist beauty,” not an American beauty, and any efforts to make herself something she is not, even in the name of American citizenship, will inevitably fail (Ginsberg 29). When citizenship imposes itself on people who do not desire it, the results will be ugly. However, when these racial and gender roles are rejected, consciously or unconsciously, the results can be an increased sense of citizenship. The narrator of “Song of Myself,” whose sense of citizenship is the most positive and universal of the three texts, interprets his citizenship as a mandate to think and act freely, functioning as a virtual representative of citizenship in order to uphold its integrity. When a runaway slave seeks refuge at the narrator’s home, the narrator is presented with a choice between actual representation (following the letter of the law) or virtual representation (exercising his right as a citizen to freely follow his own conscience), and chooses the