The American Spectator

Slavery as a Cultural Trauma Slavery is one of the most significant cultural traumas in American history dating back to the year 1619 in the state of Virginia (Franklin, 2000). Though slavery officially ended years ago (December, 1865), its affect on contemporary African Americans as a cultural trauma appears to be cyclical. The cycle may continue because the trauma existed after slavery ended, and at times, occurs today according to the majority of the participants interviewed for this…

author’s details suggest the ability to change the world through your beliefs and what you know is true. Jefferson and Grant’s realization helped to spark the country’s awareness to how wrong the oppression the majority of people were giving to African Americans everywhere. Jefferson’s realization that he could die a man and a martyr, Grant’s refusal to be a bystander to the constant racism, and the society’s reaction to victories similar to these helped carry out the civil rights movement that…

African Americans’ Struggle The use of an unknown narrator in “Battle Royal” by Ralph Waldo Ellison has an important significance in the story. The author is both trying to deliver the message of racism through the story of his character, and in the meantime, he is showing the reader that racism was a fact for every black person regardless who that person may be. It is also important to understand the story from its historical context. The story was written in 1952 in the era of legal racial…

A strong yet controversial figure in American poetry, Nikki Giovanni rose into fame through the social mayhems of the late-1960s and early-1970s. Although Giovanni’s poetry was originally recognized for unique powerful “Black Power” point of view, Giovanni 's poetry covers a wide variety of themes—from young innocence to intense sexuality. Giovanni 's poems are highly personal statements of anger and love, capable of tenderness, humor, and irony. They are dynamically individualistic—even to the…

Adrenaline rushed through my tensed body as though I inched toward the edge of a cliff ready to jump off. Governor Hutchinson just rejected our plea to send the Dartmouth back to England, and everyone in Boston couldn’t take much more of England’s petty games of taxation and their seemingly unlimited power over the colonies. Once the governor’s answer came to everyone at the Old South Meetinghouse, I think we all felt something needed to be done to send a message to England that we had enough…

Racial discrimination represents an issue which damages the foundation of any civilized society – it turns people against each other and has no basis except ignorance and thirst for power. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” approaches this problem through the eyes of a young black man, at the beginning of the twentieth century in America, an invisible entity without a voice in a divided society, in which political decisions are made by the white people in power. The main character is…

I did not choose to do my forum on The Political Force of Images theme, but your post did an amazing job of describing why you believe the chosen artwork was a good representation of the theme. Your description of the sculpture is very strong and I do believe the Santiago Matamoros is a good representation of the Spanish reconquista. As you mentioned in your post, he was called Saint James the Moor Slayer and was a very important figure in the reconquest. He was clearly known for slaying many…

about her childhood and young adult years, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, which made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. Since publishing Caged Bird, Angelou continued to break new ground—not just artistically, but educationally and socially.Angelou is considered one of the best African American poets ever, she won a lot of awards for her heartwarming poems but “Caged bird” is one of Angelou’s most famous…

more unnerving than carrying feelings of undesirability, isolation, struggle, and desolation. As early as the 1600’s African Americans have had to fight for their voices to be heard, for the definition of equality to be understood, and for the barrier between the oppressed and the oppressor to be shattered once and for all. Despite the plethora of adversities that African American people had to face during previous years, a motif was apparent, not giving up. In the words of Frederick Douglas,…

and still promotes the same messages it did in 1941 even when modifications have been made. In a more recent Disney film, in The Princess and The Frog (Clements and Musker 2009) Disney attempts to be more inclusive, by creating the first African American Princess in their movies. However, Princess Tiana’s husband is not the same race as she is, meanwhile the rest of the Princesses have Princes that are the same race as them. The making of Prince Naveen as racially…