Afro-Latin American

know how fragile life is. Ta-Nehisi describes the dream as the suburbs, as treehouses and cub scouts. He says that the Dream “smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry cake” (11). However the Dream rests on the backs of African Americans. African Americans never get to experience the dream because the bedding is made from their bodies and built on their broken bodies. Ta-Nehisi uses the last pages of the novel to explain that although the Dreamers have placed them into a box, they still…

of imposing through poetry to all races makes you believe he was destined to be the best. The struggles the African American, race was experiencing is exposed through Countee Cullen’s, work. He brought new respect and awareness to the black race; through poems like “Heritage”, “Fruit of The Flower,” and “Incident”. His life experiences were quite different from most African Americans of his era; which helped shape his brilliance. This made him much of an economic figure, because it gave him the…

During the time period that Mark Twain wrote his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn black Americans were at a pivotal point in history. They were no longer owned as slaves, and, yet, they had not quite transitioned into the ranks of upstanding society. Mark Twain uses his novel to pull the reader’s attention away from the label of “slave” and towards the actuality that Jim, the runaway slave, is a human being, who in most cases proved to be more upstanding than anyone else in the novel.…

Sometimes, these Black girls negate their own safety by choosing not to speak out against the person who has violated their personal safety and security. As Patricia Hill Collins Asserts, “African American women grapple with the long-standing sanctions within their communities that urge them to protect African American men at all costs, including keeping “family secrets” by remaining silent about male abuse” (Black Sexual Politics 226). This commonality is flagrant throughout the black community…

By intentionally removing knowledge, both in the educational sense and in the sense of one’s internal understanding, it was much easier for those in power to define specifically where they themselves were comfortable having black Americans fall within the social spectrum. This, therefore, allowed a system to exist that couldn’t really be tackled in any large amount until the Civil Rights Movement, over a century after the abolition of slavery in the United States. To understand the…

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes compares the history and the soul of black communities to four great rivers around the world. The poem takes the reader on a historical journey through different places and times. It links black history with the birth of civilization and the creation of the world: “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.” Hughes conception of the black experience and rich ancient existence in “The Negro Speaks…

imminent danger to society, no matter the age. It is a constant idea that black men are absent from a child’s life, a constant idea that people questioned my life with. My father is involved in my life, and my father is not absent, or a threat to American society, something that should not have to be said but I will most likely have to say until his demise. In modern media today it is typical to see a black male absent from a child’s life, to see the black males on the streets, or black males…

Nikki Giovanni not like any other writer is a strong, independent, African American woman. Although, her childhood wasn’t the brightest, it pushed her to strive and become one of the best female poets in literary history. Her books and her poems zoom in on the struggles of many African Americans and her own personal experiences. Not many people can say that they succeeded in their life and are satisfied at where they are now. Not only can Nikki Giovanni say she succeeded and made a better life…

police at least eleven times as police held him to the ground and before he died. Eric Garner was unarmed and under suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, but at the end the police showed that his live did not matter. Richard Sherman an African American male and extremely intelligent athlete who has repeatedly stated that he is all for all lives matter. Richard Sherman said "I stand by what I said that All Lives Matter and that we are human beings” (Stracham). Philando Castile was shot…

experience. It is scientifically proven that when a black person is killed by someone of another race especially a cop, it is felt by everyone of that culture. The reason being is the idea of fictive kin and the theory of the Ubuntu. Culturally, African Americans are more community based and interdependent, therefore, when tragedy happens the affect is felt due to the meaning of Ubuntu which means “I am what I am because of what we…