ipl-logo

Humiliate Bigger's Native Son

473 Words2 Pages

What seemingly seems of no importance, language played a big role in how black people felt while encountering white people. Although as it was in the case of Mary and Jan, they did not mean to discriminate or humiliate Bigger, the way they talked also reminded him of their supremacy and the wall so thick between their races. To show the point of language playing a big role in showing division of the two races, we shall take a look at the following passage from Native Son: “You know, Bigger, I’ve long wanted to go into those houses and just see how your people live […] I just want to see. I want to know these people […] Yet they must live like we live […] they live in our country… In the same city with us…” (Wright, 101). This passage lets us …show more content…

All in all, she was raised up, being told about “us” and “them people”. Mary and Jan were blind to recognize Bigger’s feelings. Their failure in noticing that their dinner invitation, shaking hands with him, sitting up front in the car, it all made Bigger very uncomfortable. They put him in a situation he had never been before and did not know how he should have responded to it. They took for granted the fact that Bigger had not been used to deal with white people in other ways than providing services to them. Bigger as probably million others African Americans was not used to the “friendly” approach of white people, it was attributed to the fact that blacks in America were under severe oppression for hundreds of years. That was the only reality they knew. Therefore, the behavior of Mary and Jan was fatally misunderstood by Bigger. Because of the pressure they put on him and the fact that they seemed to ignore his emotions, only made Bigger confirm his beliefs that he was invisible to the white

Show More
Related
292 Words | 2 Pages

Mary Mebane recalls as freshmen was stopped by the chairman’s wife because of how well Mary scored on her verbal examination compared to the white people at her school. She knows that the chairman 's wife thought it was a fluke and she speaks to her, but Mebane knows that this is out of an act of racism. Mebane then shows African people how their people are just viewed as numbers. She also shows the stereotype how light skin students were smarter people than darker students but what was even worse to the eyes of the school is that she is a dark- skinned woman. She continues to target African women with the example of her friend Lucy which was a, “Dark Dark skinned” girl that chose to hang around a light skin girl named Patricia.

Read More
445 Words | 2 Pages

. She does not treat the black servants well so they decide to leave the job . Several servants come and go because she abuses them. Mary's life becomes miserable.

Read More
1311 Words | 6 Pages

Turner perpetuates anti-blackness in her own black community by directly dismissing one’s personality based on the color of their skin, worshipping whiteness as a god, and working to achieve a racial hierarchy based on Eurocentric standards of beauty. As off-season for harvesting has commenced, Janie and Tea Cake have decided to remain on their residence in the Muck during this time of year; thus, Janie has more leisure time. Mrs. Turner, a townswoman of the Muck, begins to speak with Janie in her home during their free time about Janie’s husband, Tea Cake, and urges her to marry her brother instead. Mrs. Turner “didn’t forgive [Janie] for marrying a man as dark as Tea Cake, but she felt that she could remedy that” (Hurston 140). Here, Mrs. Turner clearly reveals her colorism against dark-skinned members of her community.

Read More
766 Words | 4 Pages

“There’s not a seat downstairs. Do you all reckon it’ll be all right if you all came to the balcony with me?” (Lee 186) Back in the 1930’s there was no reason to have Whites or Blacks together in any way, shape, or form. It was not acceptable to have both races talk with each other, be in the same restaurant, movie theatre, or basically anything. Racism is a big concept throughout the novel.

Read More
934 Words | 4 Pages

Bigger’s anxiety and fear of the power of white society on blacks leads him to act out his own feelings of suffocation by smothering the white socialite Mary Dalton by accident, an event that causes more intense terror and derives him to burn her corpse in the furnace. When his plan of escape spirals out of control, Bigger attempts to reclaim his threatened autonomy by asserting sexual dominance over his black girlfriend Bessie. However, raping Bessie does not strip her of all power; Bigger fears she can still expose him. The only way Bigger can completely conquer Bessie is to kill

Read More
881 Words | 4 Pages

The black narrator who remains unknown through the entire story are the one person that we do not get any information about. The characters of the story, which are the most mention is Willie and Mr. Lynch. Mary is also one of the characters were we get to know a little part of her personality, because she is living in the apartment up stairs, were the police shot at. Mary have an aggressive behavior “you shot up my new drapes! I

Read More
938 Words | 4 Pages

They had to stay in the kitchen just because their skin tone was different. Douglas viewed this as irrational. Hearing the disrespect people of color were receiving will persuade the audience to make a change. A young African American woman was in church and she decided to “partake of the same sacramental elements with the others'' conversely, “when the

Read More
665 Words | 3 Pages

As a black woman, she faced an extremely hard life. She knew it too, as seen in her conversation with Nanny: “So the white man throw down de land… He hand it to his womenfolks… de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see” (page 14). Black women were mistreated by both white men and black men. Jody struck Janie on multiple occasions, forced her to tie her hair up, and submissed her into complete inferiority (page 71).

Read More
633 Words | 3 Pages

In Janie’s third marriage with Tea Cake, they encounter a white racist woman named Mrs. Turner. She is comfortable talking to Janie because she is part white and wants to bring her from the dark side to that of the light. One of her beliefs is that “it’s too may black folks already. We oughta lighten up the race” (Hurston 140).

Read More
553 Words | 3 Pages

She mostly illustrates the effects that it had on the african american community, but she really likes to allude and show the fact there are other misrepresented, like the native americans in the passage. The way she decided to address the issue is by using irony. She writes “, so the Indians could be, must be wrong.” This line itself is not that bad, when I first read it I thought Janie was just in denial. But, She also says “Indians are dumb anyhow, always were.”

Read More
106 Words | 1 Pages

Some the whites did not know how to live with the colored. Some of the white were fine with living freely with the colored.

Read More
856 Words | 4 Pages

In the Everglades a new lady arrives to the town, Mrs.Turner, and immediately befriends Janie. She seems friendly at first but as she and Janie get deeper into conversation Janie soon discovers what Mrs.Turner believes in. She is very racist, which is ironic because she is not even fully white herself. In a conversation with Janie she says, “Mis’ Woods, Ah have often said to my husband, Ah don’t see how a lady like Mis’ Woods can stand all them common niggers around her place all de time”(Hurston 140).

Read More
697 Words | 3 Pages

Racism is portrayed in an interesting way in Their Eyes Were Watching God. For example, Janie and Tea Cake encounter Mrs Turner, a black lady who is racist towards other blacks. Whether white or black, everyone in this book seems to have been affected by racism in some way; many different perspectives of racism are investigated in this book. Naturally, this is intriguing because the reader discovers a three-dimensional aspect to a topic that has always seemed very black and white. Zora Neale Hurston paints a picture of racism in an odd manor, bringing a different perspective to a global conflict at the time.

Read More
1843 Words | 8 Pages

The white people viewed slaves as sub-human, and a black woman who was mentally superior was not something they would have encountered before. Dana explains what Margaret, Tom’s wife, may have been feeling; “I don’t think Margaret likes educated slaves any better than her husband does…. He can barely read and write. And she’s not much better” (Butler 82).

Read More
1194 Words | 5 Pages

The discrimination against the white race begins with a gradual distinct treatment of the African Americans who appear to have a trace of the white race. Helene proves to have a more formal dialect as she asks for “the bathroom” (23) and the black woman cannot understand until Helene finally refers to it as “the toilet” (23). The difference in word choice distinct Helene from the African Americans in the Bottom. The fact that Helene also has fairer skin than the African Americans gives the black woman a reason to believe Helene has a trace of white. Therefore, when Helene approaches the black woman on the train, “[the woman fastens her eyes]…on the thick velvet, the fair skin, [and] the high tone voice” (23), as if surprised and shocked to see an African American women appear in such a manner.

Read More

More about Humiliate Bigger's Native Son

Related Topics

Open Document