American Splendor

Skin bleaching is one of the most common lengths that some dark-skinned African-American women go through in order to feel beautiful. Skin bleaching is a process in which one applies a bleaching ointment or regular household bleach to the skin in order to appear lighter. Cosmetic surgery is another extreme measure that is taken by dark-skinned women. Many dark-skinned African-American women have had nose jobs and lip reduction surgery in order to gain the features that have been…

School of Communication at Washington State University, expresses in his article, “Television Viewing, and Perceptions about Race, “Historically in family centered shows, African Americans have been portrayed as less educated, from broken homes, and possessing lower status jobs than white” (3). Our perception of African Americans is going to be that they are less educated because that is what the television is portraying them as. Television continues to affect our perception of ethnicity…

song “Strange Fruit” the singer of the song sings about some rather strange fruit. The singer is an African American, female Jazz singer called Billie Holiday. “Strange Fruit” was released during 1939 in the time where segregation was still pretty big in the south. Lynching had been happening for a few years before the song was released. While definitely a way to dehumanize African Americans, which is wrong, there was some reasons for them other than simple hating of a different race. Some of…

and Italian) that all seem to coexist in a harmony. Segregation relation can be described as separating people based on race or ethnicity into specific groups that have their own rights/roles in society. This can be easily exemplified in the post-american Civil War era into the 1960’s with the racial segregation in the South of the United States. Based on the doctrine “separate but equal” after the court ruling of the Plessy vs Ferguson trial, segregation based on skin color was enforced…

than that. Racism will always be around you, if it is against whites, blacks, Asians, or any other race. People will never change, that’s the sad thing about this world. There will always be discrimination, segregation, and “no” freedom for African Americans, even thirty years from now. People will always discriminate other races or different genders. Let’s just focus on the race discrimination,…

Slavery has been around for thousands of years. In Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, slavery is a large part of the culture. The thought of slavery is plane wrong in both aspects of owning and being a slave but many don’t have the same view. Slavery’s affect on past and present times has made it a large topic to examine. The Hypocrisy within slavery is a very obvious problem within the Southern culture for the United States. Jim the slave in the novel adds to the confusion of why slavery wasn’t…

The age of rapid urbanization was upon the United States in the early 19th century was a big push for most Americans, giving up their farmsteads and pitchforks for skyscrapers and hammers. Americans moving from rural areas to begin with was a rough start, just after the civil war tensions and racism still was very prevalent in the segregated south so many African Americans chose to move to the urban north to try and escape the racial violence. Once the populations in cities began to rise…

The border states between the North and South faced a migration of African Americans attempting to begin a life anywhere except under the oppression of Jim Crow and the bleak conditions of the postbellum South. As extremist movements and relational events occurred throughout the nation, urban areas experienced a renaissance of black culture. Was this period truly the “birth of a nation?” As black culture graced America with music, art, and literature, white Protestant women attempted to gain…

if the main reasons black culture is celebrated today. Langston Hughes, or James Mercer, was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin Missouri. He died May 22, 1967 in New York City (Webster 209). Born with a racial background of African, French, Native American, and English ancestry, Hughes used his background throughout his life as an inspiration for his art. Hughes attended elementary school in Lincoln, Illinois. In his class, he was elected as class poet, which may have started his fame in poetry.…

In the stories “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara, and “The Struggle to be an All American Girl” by Elizabeth Wong, and the poem “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich, each of the writers focus on the positive and negative aspects of education. While part of the setting for Louise Erdrich’s poem and Elizabeth Wong’s story take place inside an actual school, the setting for Toni Cade Bambara’s story doesn’t take place inside a school; however, for all three stories, the…