If Only Skin was Neither Black or White For hundreds of years, racism has been a major issue in the world. Despite civil wars, riots and other atrocities, races remain competitive. In the short story “The Flowers”, Alice Walker advances the idea that the contrast of white and black represents a violent friction between races. In the beginning of the story, Myop innocently skips around her farm admiring the beautiful harvests. As she moves farther away from her sharecropper cabin, she stops at the stream where her family collects their drinking water. Looking at the river, “Myop watched the tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and the water that silently rose and slid away down the stream”(Walker 3). Although Myop may …show more content…
She stumbles upon a decapitated head and corpse. As she examines the body, she realizes, “He had been a tall man. From feet to neck covered a long space. His head lay beside him. When she pushed back the layers of earth and debris Myop saw that he’d had large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken, long fingers, and very big bones. All his clothes has rotted away except some threads of blue denim from his overalls”(Walker 7). Based on his size and clothing, the man that Myop stumbles upon is most likely an African American who worked on the farm. His broken teeth suggest he was beaten and next to the body Myop finds a noose, which implies that the man was not only abused, but also lynched. The author notes that the rope is bleached white, which symbolizes the violence of the white race towards blacks. This clear example of conflict between white and black is enough to cause Myop to lay down her flowers, end summer and leave her innocence behind. Despite the fact that people similar to Myop have encountered and even fought racism over the years, it continues to cause problems in the modern world. Earlier this summer an outbreak in North Carolina occurred between a group