Blackness

The most powerful message in Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is that race is not a real thing that can be determined by a person's phenotype (the color their hair, skin, etc;). He presents blackness and whiteness as constructs used to reinforce the power dynamics of racism. Although what it meant to be white has changed so many times throughout the history of the United States, it maintained its perceived place of superiority and normalcy compared to anything, and anyone else.…

The Alienation of the Black Girl Alienation comes in different forms, and may come for different reasons. But wherever or however it occurs, it always operates on the notion of distance, necessarily estranging the individual from his/her environment, and vice versa. As the term implies, the process works by making an individual feel that his/her presence in a particular environment is alien or artificial at best, even if this is not necessarily the case, making them feel unwelcome or unnecessary…

Middle Passage Blackness is dead. Their history is forgotten. Their soles are tainted. Their color is undefined and we are all black. One must not view Blackness as simply a skin color rather an Ontological Experience. The experience occurred during the middle passage in which it ceased being the African American people, but a division of humane and inhumane; with the African now deemed as the black body. In this episode of humanity an entire people were Dis-identified, Disenfranchised, and…

depends on their marriage and their marriage’s meaning is invested in Othello’s blackness” (Little 306). The racism drove him crazy and Iago didn’t make it better. When Iago tells Othello that Desdemona was cheating on him, he thought that his blackness and Moorish characteristics changed her and made her do it because Iago and other characters like Brabantio said it would. When Othello killed Desdemona, his literal blackness became metaphorical (Little 322). As soon as Emilia found out that…

Andre Sydnor English 10 Honors Mrs. Linnihan 3 November 2014 Title In the novel Lord Of The Flies by William Golding, there are many symbols representing many different things. A fire of some sort is going or mentioned on almost every page of the novel. The conch that Piggy and Ralph find in the beginning relates to almost every theme of this novel. The lord of the flies is a titular symbol that is a direct contrast to the conch shell. While these are not all the symbols in the novel, the…

For centuries, America has always directly or indirectly oppressed and/or discriminated one or more groups of people. It started out with the Natives and then the Africans, even Italians and the Irish were discriminated against. Noted that all this discrimination had occurred at time when many, many people lacked their inalienable rights. Now America is one the most powerful countries in the entire world and we do have a system that grants every human being in America their inalienable rights.…

Clare would like to return to her “Blackness” and Irene would like to adopt the white lifestyle. Clare has completely immersed herself in the white world by marrying a white man and further whitening her children. Clare married wealthy so her lifestyle had further privilege added to it even…

People often think of race as something that is ethnic and exotic, something that only people of color possess. However, whiteness is just as much of a race as any other, yet we continue to ignore the fact that being white is conceptually the same as being black, Hispanic, Muslim, or what have you. This idea is called white privilege and it is based on the social construct that gives white people an advantage, socially, over all other races. Whiteness is constructed in such a way that it is…

should not look at her as though something strange had happened to her. She also admonishes people not to rejoice at her sufferings and tribulations. They should not consider her ugly because of her blackness, because her blackness is inseparable. The rays of scorching sun on her caused her blackness. The sun here shows that she is persecuted by God’s will. We can make analogy from (Matthew 13.6), And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered…

Kristen Myers dedicated this book to the discussion of what she calls “racetalk.” She defines racetalk as “the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks that we use to denigrate different races and ethnicities in our everyday lives” (pg. 2). In this book, she defines the signification of three groups: whites, blacks and browns. It is important that she defines the signification of each group in order to better understand what gives the dominant group its power. The book then moves on to how…