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A companion to We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity review discussion
History of racism america
A companion to We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity review discussion
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Racism has been an issue for many years and will continue to occur in the future. In the years of the 1800’s and earlier, slavery existed and blacks were horribly mistreated in America. However, the act of owning another person was abolished in the mid 1800’s; this didn't stop people from harassing, harming, and killing innocent black citizens. By the middle of the 20th century it seemed that the mistreating of black lives needed to be stopped. This lead to the civil rights movement with leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks, that all risked everything to take a stand.
In his paper,"Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space," Brent Staples clarifies how for the duration of his life, others have oppressed him in light of the fact that he is a tall, dark man who fills in as a writer in a transcendently white field. As he clarifies, he initially acknowledged the amount of his appearance terrified others, especially a white lady, when he used to take late night strolls as a graduate understudy. While he comprehends that we live in a society that has turned out to be progressively savage and perilous, he feels disappointed that dark men, specifically, are as yet being judged and misconstrued in view of their appearance alone. For instance, he refers to two occurrences where he was mixed
The message Staples wants to convey in his essay is that almost all people have to carry the burden of the stereotype they have, and he pushes this message through his use of ethos and pathos. Staples pushes his message through ethos by his use of expert testimony. One of the writers he quotes is Norman Podhoretz and his essay “My Negro Problem-And Ours”. Describing the fear he had while growing up, Podhoretz writes about how much
He wrote this piece to express his important opinion about the effect of racism and how he’s viewed as a man of color. He talks about his first encounter of racism when he was young man in college and was assumed to be a mugger or killer just because of skin. “It was in echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into the ability to alter public space in ugly ways.” I feel that the author is trying to connect to his vast audience of people who don’t understand what it is like to a black man in society. Later he contemplated that he rejected or shunned by the white race collectively as a dangerous man.
Another way to put it is that there is a basket of apples that represents black men, and a couple of those are bad apples. But society thinks that because there are some bad apples, then the rest must be bad as well. This thought process is harmful to the progression of society as a whole. Staples explains how even with the negative stigmas attributed to him, he tries his best to go against the stereotypes by comforting and reassuring others that he is not what he is made out to be, by doing subtle things that are more attributed to a white man’s actions rather than a black
The U.S. has not fully moved on from the time before the civil rights movement. The hatred towards Black Americans has just transferred not been abolished. It has transferred into the form of police brutality and white supremacists causing the life of an Black American to become living hell. There are many more things that have been a downside of being an African American like highest unemployment due to their ethnicity or how they aren’t given the same opportunities of those of white color but the three things I think Richard
Joe Starks symbolizes this in instances where he speaks to Janie as a subordinate; because of the pressure put on black men to be hyper-masculine, they then force themselves into “maleness” thus mimicking the role of the colonizer, not manifesting it. Because black bodies cannot access a gendered lense, they have to pretend to be what they are not. As shown through Hurston, this does not make blackness or black maleness any closer to whiteness. It creates unwarranted and detrimental binaries that allow for the perpetuation of abuse in the black
On top of this, he argues that the white middle class are unrelenting with their methods of depriving black advancement in American society. Knowledge of this incites many blacks to occupy dead-end jobs, or to settle for mediocrity in the face of adversity. A large number of black males in America find themselves forced to take jobs that offer no security, or socioeconomic growth. He also contends that many blacks are not very literate and therefore left behind in cultural revolutions like the information age. For twelve months between 1962 and 1963, Liebow and a group of researchers studied the behavior of a group of young black men who lived near and frequently hung around a street corner in a poor black neighborhood in downtown Washington, D.C. Liebow’s participant observation revealed the numerous obstacles facing black men on a day-to-day basis, including the structural and individual levels of racial discrimination propagated by whites in society.
Toward the end of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, the protagonist Billy Lynn grapples with the decision of going back to war in Iraq or going AWOL. The reasons that he wants to leave the army vary. His reasons for leaving range from wanting to stay with his girlfriend Faison to wanting to stay and help his family. His reasons for wanting to go back to war all revolve around the friendship and brotherhood between himself and his fellow squad members.
These social norms were taught to him by his society he was surrounded by, and they were developed to uphold a capitalist system this conditioning serves to keep the lowest class in Kindred, black people, “oppressed… effectively by ideology,” (Tyson
Adam Daniel Beittel, former president of Talladega College (1945-1952) and Tugaloo College (1960-1964), once made a very strong statement about segregated education that also applies to institutionalized racism. He says that it has “one principle or purpose- this is to maintain the superiority of the white, the inferiority of the Negro, to keep the white above and the Negro below. ”(Beittel, pp 140) In Walk, other than the bus boycott, this is the most blatant form of institutionalized racism that we see. Odessa Carter, a black woman is being told by a white man, that she should not be in the park, because her kind is not welcome.
He was seen as a violent black rapist who forced himself upon an innocent white woman, and was most defiantly guilty of the crime. However, when he is proven innocent it enlightens the audience about how stereotypes can falsely portray African Americans, and shows the major damage they can cause to people’s lives (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” 2016). Overall, this movie teaches the audience that stereotyping groups can be damaging to the way individuals view others, and if we want peace among people of all races, then we have to push past stereotypes to learn who people really are on the
**.’ It all seemed like a regular part of life growing up in the Bronx. “It seemed like everyone from the barbers, mechanics… felt the same way: black and white people were different, and life would always be a harder struggle because you were black” (18). This quote shows that Jamal experienced systemic racism at a younger age. He knows about it
This unfortunate stereotype is still highly prevalent today. We all read about African-American men committing crimes, we see it in the news and on social media. That goes to say, not all crimes are committed solely by black men, and black men should not be treated like criminals based off of others wrongdoings. Staples recounts the events of a night he went for a walk. On this walk, he encountered a well-dressed white woman (as he so described) who instinctively mistook him for a criminal.
In the poem "Black Boys Play the Classics" by Toi Derricotte, racism against black people is prevalent and obvious. The poem describes the contrast between how different races treat each other. As in the poem, the people who only pass by and do not take the time to listen to this boy's talent. They merely ignore the black boy playing his instrument. While the other black people stayed and listened to this boy play and a small white boy who hadn’t yet learned racism.
