Colored

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and a leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He delivered his famous “I have a Dream” speech, at the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963 in order to call for an end of racism in the United States. In his speech Martin Luther King Jr. attempted to convince the majority white United States government to give African Americans equal rights through the use of biblical and historical allusions, alliterations, and imagery. King…

This article was extremely interesting and thought-provoking, I feel as if it’s something that most people should read in their lifetime. The very first sentence is something along the lines of racism is mainly taught to people as being see in individual acts of meanness, not hidden systems that give dominance to a certain group of people and I honestly think that’s what society taught to the white people I knew from my younger years. McIntosh also goes on to tie in male privilege and how while…

The Secret About Whitewashing: A Message to Hollywood Globalisation is an important factor in shaping modern life. With the world as interconnected as it is, it is critical that our media should reflect a much broader audience. Hollywood however has overlooked this need for more ethnic representation and instead blatantly ignores how the world is made up of a diverse collection of people who all have a story to tell. A non-stereotypical, non-background character of colour is a hard thing for…

The Intersection of Sexuality and White Privilege True feminism teaches us that women experience multiple oppressions and privileges that show the unique struggles faced all over the world. Feminism is not one universal movement that applies to every woman. In the words of Barbra Smith in her essay Making Face, Making Soul (1990), she writes, Feminism is a political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of colour, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, lesbians,…

Ifn a society that has oppression of PoC (people of color) deeply embedded in its history (and even today), whitewashing concocts a false illusion that race problems do not exist, that PoC do not face discrimination and that PoC do not need representing. “anything, as deceptive words or actions, used to cover up or gloss over faults, errors, or wrongdoings, or absolve a wrongdoer from blame” is the definition of Whitewashing by Dictionary.com. Since 1937 T.V. has been putting white actors into…

What is America? People might see a large land surrounded with water, others might see a massive country with many different opportunities for survival. However, it is hard for some to see how people really live on this land. They do not see the chaotic madness that is happening between the people living on this land that is known as America. In Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the main character, Ifemelu, experiences life in this chaotic place called America. Ifemelu lived in Nigeria…

Knowing certain societal constructs and expectations can be a major burden on every individual within that society. In Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” we see a young girl named Pecola Breedlove struggling with her community’s beauty standards, causing her to consistently beg for blue eyes. While the poem “Much Madness is divinest Sense” by Emily Dickinson shows that while the majority who follow all of the “rules” may be the truly be the ones that are mad, the ones who go against the grain are…

Take a walk through any major city and one will soon notice campaigns and magazines plastered with white faces lining the streets. And during Fashion month, twice a year, the lack of diversity becomes apparent through designers runway shows and displays of art. The fashion industry has not always been dominated by white models; in fact, non-white models used to make up almost half of the industry’s models. However, over the past decade, non-white models struggle to be recognized for their…

The comparison between African-American and white women, all poor and working class, speaks to recent criticisms within feminist scholarship, where Elizabeth Spelman, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, and others point to a distinctly white middle-class bias. Work within recent years by white women and women of color has attempted to open up feminist thought to the perspectives and practices of those who the black man and subsequent police behavior. As Spelman argued a number of years ago,…

The film Great Debaters starring Denzel Washington is a powerful example of a movie that can show you different aspects of the change in society. The movie is about a teacher, Denzel Washington who tried to teach an African American debate team how to compete and to improve on every level. This was a hard thing to do because around this time in America, it was hard for anybody of color to be this successful. He ran into many roadblocks while trying to produce success and making sure that his…